New Delhi: Gaganyatri Shubhanshu Shukla has posted a video of India as it appears from space on X as a Diwali Greeting. The cities of Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and New Delhi have been marked in the video, which was presumably captured during Shukla’s visit to the International Space Station (ISS) earlier in the year, as part of the Axiom 4 mission. In the greeting, Shukla posted, “Up there, watching this grand spectacle unfold, you can’t help but smile. This isn’t just Diwali on Earth — it’s Diwali of Earth. The festival of lights, written across an entire nation, glowing proudly on a cosmic stage.”
Flying over India from space — from the sunlit southwest to the misty northeast — is like watching a living galaxy unfurl beneath you. You don’t just see it; you feel it in every fibre of your being.
The peninsula glows like a jewel. To the left, Pune sparkles; below, Bengaluru… pic.twitter.com/ZWfwWFlz9R
— Shubhanshu Shukla (@gagan_shux) October 20, 2025
A number of space agencies were involved with the Axiom 4 commercial flight to the ISS, which is why it takes time for the imagery captured on board to be verified and cleared. After reaching the orbital complex, Shukla began to learn the unique tricks necessary to capture spectacular images of Earth and space from the unique vantage point of the ISS, travelling at 7.66 km per second. The space station orbits the Earth sixteen times a day, so astronomers witness 16 orbital sunrises and sunsets, as seen towards the end of the video. Night on the space station is not the same as night on the ground, with most of the stars being hard to see most of the time.
ISRO’s Gaganyaan Programme
Shukla’s experience on the ISS is helping ISRO iron out the kinks and fill in any procedural gaps in its own ambitious human spaceflight programme. ISRO plans to execute a series of eight Gaganyaan flights, one every six months. The first uncrewed Gaganyaan flight is scheduled for the end of 2025, with the first crewed flight in 2027. A total of two crewed flights are planned as part of the Gaganyaan programme, that culminates with the deployment of the first module of the Bharatiya Antariksh Station (BAS), India’s own orbital complex. India aims to assemble the BAS in orbit through a series of launches, with the aim of realising a fully operational space station by 2035.