A Star is Born

Maggie does not watch television or movies. She is visually impaired. Maggie can see fine, but the nature of her visual impairment is such that she just cannot process the moving images on a screen. It is too fast for her. She often looks away rather than look at the screen.

This morning I went with her class to the Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences. I was not sure how she would do with it. The show was fantastic. The planetarium just opened and the room is designed perfectly for its purpose. The kids in the wheelchairs entered from the top floor and had perfect seats at the top or the very steep room. (However, I suspect every seat was perfect).

The show started out in the daytime with a view of the very building in which we were sitting. It became dark and we “travelled” first to the moon and then all around the solar system. It was very cool. I looked over at Maggie next to me; she loved it! The celestial sky moved slowly and she was drinking in the constellations and the planets. We learned about the rock planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, and the gas giants Saturn and Jupiter. The room, filled with schoolchildren, was quiet. The music was soothing. It was very relaxing.

Very.

Relaxing.

I feel asleep before we got to Uranus and slept right through Neptune. When I woke up they were talking about Plutoids (poor Pluto – it had a MUCH bigger role when I was a student).

Though it lulled me to dreamland, Maggie was enthralled. I think we found the right pace for her. She was gazing at the stars with a huge smile on her face. We “travelled” back to Earth and eventually back to the building we were sitting in.

I always knew Maggie was a big picture girl, I guess I never realized how big the picture really was.