Nature’s Very Own Fireworks: What India’s Visitor To The ISS Saw Beneath Him
From 400 kilometres up, a thunderstorm does not look like weather. It looks like someone setting off crackers under a sheet. The cloud deck glows from within, goes dark, and glows again somewhere else, and the whole continent beneath flickers
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“Diwali has always held a special place in my heart and has been my favourite festival for as long as I can remember,” he wrote. “There is something about the magic of lights, the sparkle and the fireworks that fills me with a sense of wonder and joy.”
Looking down at the storms, he said, “they reminded me of nature’s very own fireworks — a beautiful, unexpected reminder that the universe has its own way of celebrating light.” He wished his friends and their families a happy Dhanteras, and hoped the season would fill their homes with “light, happiness, good health and prosperity.”
Diwali is a festival about light showing up in the dark like a simple row of clay lamps along a parapet, a doorway lit so that prosperity can find its way in. Lightning is the same indulgence conducted at enormous scale: a storm, which is the darkest thing in any sky, producing the brightest. He happened to be in the one place from which you can watch it happen to a whole hemisphere at once.
Shukla is a test pilot from Lucknow with more than 2,000 flying hours who, in June 2025, became the first Indian to board the International Space Station and the second Indian to reach space, forty-one years after Rakesh Sharma. He flew as pilot of Axiom Mission 4, under the command of the veteran American astronaut Peggy Whitson and alongside crewmates from Poland and Hungary, in an arrangement stitched together between the Indian space agency, NASA and SpaceX. He spent a little over twenty days off the planet and ran some sixty experiments, several of them set by ISRO. In January this year he was awarded the Ashoka Chakra, India’s highest peacetime military decoration.
He was clear at the time about what the flight was for. In his first message from orbit he told the country that his journey was “not a beginning to the International Space Station” but to India’s own human spaceflight programme — a distinction that sounded modest and was not. He is assigned to Gaganyaan, the mission that aims to put Indians into orbit on an Indian rocket from Indian soil, after which the country intends to build a station of its own. The lander that set down near the Moon’s south pole in 2023 belonged to the same lineage of ambition.
Which is part of why a short clip of weather got the attention it did. The video is not a feat. It is a man with a camera at a window. But the window was on the far side of a long effort, and when he turned it towards home what he saw was the festival he grew up with.
Diwali has always held a special place in my heart and has been my favourite festival for as long as I can remember. There is something about the magic of lights, the sparkle and the fireworks that fills me with a sense of wonder and joy. While in space, I captured this video and couldn’t help noticing the flashes of lightning dancing across the Earth below. Looking down from space, they reminded me of nature’s very own fireworks — a beautiful, unexpected reminder that the universe has its own way of celebrating light. It felt particularly special to come across this sight, and I couldn’t think of a more fitting day to share it. Wishing all my friends and their families a very Happy Dhanteras. May this festive season fill your homes and hearts with light, happiness, good health and prosperity. #shux #space #shubhanshushukla #india #axiom4
— Shubhanshu Shukla (@gagan_shux) November 6, 2026
India lit its lamps of the season on Friday, when households buy metal for luck and traders open fresh account books. Lakshmi Puja, the night of Diwali itself, falls on Sunday. Doorsteps will carry rangoli, balconies will carry diyas, and across the north the sky will do magic.