Public talks, university lectures, and media coverage
Alongside building astronomy visualizations, I give public talks and educational outreach sessions on space missions at universities and astronomy clubs. The visualizations have also been featured in news media and shared widely on Reddit and other platforms.
Online talk hosted by the Bangalore Astronomical Society, timed with the total lunar eclipse the same evening. Walks through what a lunar eclipse is, how Moon phases and lunar eclipses are connected, the geometry of umbral and penumbral shadows, why the eclipsed Moon turns red, and how eclipses are predicted — building up the foundational principles and connecting them so the 7 Sep 2025 event makes sense.
A trajectory walk-through of ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 mission, answering the questions people kept asking after the August 2023 landing — what path did the spacecraft actually take, why did it take 40 days, what are those expanding spirals around Earth, and how does the burn-and-coast pattern work. Built from foundational principles and high-school physics with interactive visual aids; not a rigorous orbit-design treatment and does not cover science payloads.
A first-person story about a stargazing trip to Keemale Estate in Coorg with Subhankar and Sragdhara on 8 February 2013 — when we thought we had spotted a comet at 4 a.m. The talk retraces the observation, the equipment we had on hand (binoculars, telescope, Canon 5D Mark III, Stellarium), and what it took to figure out whether what we saw really was a comet.
A first-principles take on Chandrayaan-3's orbit design, given as part of the Astronomy Workshop for Everyone (AWE) hosted by the Bangalore Astronomical Society. Builds the mission's expanding-spiral trajectory from physics fundamentals rather than treating it as a black box. No public recording.
An AWE-format lecture introducing eclipse geometry — solar and lunar — to a student audience at BMS College of Engineering, organized in collaboration with the Bangalore Astronomical Society. No public recording.
University lectures (no slides or recording shared publicly):
Asianet News interview
This visualization, made using an orbit generator by Sankar Viswanathan, shows Chandrayaan-2's lunar orbit insertion burn on 20 August 2019. — The Planetary Society, image caption (links back to sankara.net/chandrayaan2.html)
Reddit user @kvsankar built on Subramanian's discovery to make sure what the latter had noticed was in fact debris from the Vikram lander… He used images from the LRO, orbit data from NASA's Horizons interface, event timestamps and Photoshop to figure out the direction at which Vikram should've struck the Moon's surface, and compared it to how debris in the image Subramanian had spotted was scattered. He was able to conclude that "radial patterns at the crash site align with the orbit path more or less." — The Wire, 6 Dec 2019
Visit this link to see the animated trajectory of MOM from Earth to Mars: http://sankara.net/mom.html — Well done Mr. Sankaranarayanan K V! — ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission, official Facebook page
Selected comments on the post:
wah wah bravo… Superb. Till now I [was] thinking MOM will directly go near the Planet Mars. Now I understand it will go parallel…
Fantastic animation — makes things simple and clear. Thank U.
Great visualization for everybody to understand.
Thanks for sharing it. This gives an understanding on the trajectory of MoM and how it closes in on Mars orbit.
This is light-years better than the official NASA one that is buggy and has horrible scale. I have this saved to go to for the rest of the mission.
…this is by far the best tracker I have seen. Awesome work.
This is actually really fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing. I've been enjoying scrubbing through the timeline at different FOV's from the spacecraft looking back at the moon (joyride), it really puts things into perspective.
Cool simulator, played with it and gonna track the spaceship with it! It makes it very clear how complex the trajectory is — it's really hard to conceptualize that the ship will circle the Moon, but the Moon itself will only "drop in" at the last moment and whisk away before it even completed the orbit!
Very cool. I wanted to explain where they were to my daughter and your app could do just that. Respect.
You sir are a genius. It's working wonderfully well in my browser (Firefox). Zero hiccups, just silky smooth and great visuals. Thank you!
Just now I wanted to show my wife how the mission was going. She initially said, in effect, "I can't say I particularly care, but ok." I showed her the sped-up path the craft was taking and their perspective of the moon as they traveled, and explained how the path at this point is just gravity operating on them. She transformed to genuinely saying "that's cool!" Your tool helped to bring someone else into excitement about this mission, and that's awesome.
Sweet. Nice work. Wish NASA would display something like this in the corner of the stream, or any info at all about their location and speed etc. Big L for them.
This rules, thank you!!
This is so clutch! Thank you!
All I can say is this makes me facepalm. If someone like you who is not affiliated with ISRO in any way can do something as spectacular as this, that too purely out of enthusiasm and interest, but ISRO themselves not being interested in doing stuff like this (even openly acknowledging it), at the same time not appreciating volunteers like you… is just heartbreaking.
This is brilliant — quite a bit of effort, very appreciated!
Brilliant rendering. Keep us posted about your other projects too. Cheers mate!
It makes so much sense. Would be a valuable tool!
It is going to help me a lot in my Chandrayaan 3 mission in KSP (Kerbal Space Program).
Now this is how it is done. And everyone can still use LRO data resources to further trawl through expected debris locations and hopefully with each pass we will have more comparisons under different illumination conditions.
Thanks. You've done tremendous work btw.
Just wrote python code for easier explanation… We compare brightness calculated on each pixel on both images; if it is greater than, say 30, mark a red circle on a new image. This code is just to understand the principle.
Great analysis! Thanks for sharing!
Just for reference I added landing ellipse and the rectangular landing site drawn on OHRC's snapshot as visible on MOX screen to kvsankar's map.
YES, this is what I wanted to see. Thanks for making this.
Looking good. While we are in Chandrayaan-2 mode at the moment, such visualization would be very helpful when Aditya-L1 comes around — given ISRO would be for first time placing something around L1.
Just noticed the Z axis visual. The straight line between lunar bound phase and LOI is it a data artifact from merging two datasets? This is delightful to gawk at.
Very good work. Enjoyed it.
Brilliant!
It's a shame I can only like this once. 👍 Great job OP! 👌
Fantastic. Looks like real. Especially the moon half white and half black.
Really cool work!
Looks amazing 💯
3D scene is working fine. May be slightly reduce the size of cube representing CY2 and have 'lock on' ability on 3D view as well.
Excellent work..!! Loved the Joyride feature!
Joyride gave me zoomies. May be use a sprite for Chandrayaan-2 instead of 3D cube but then again it IS cube still haha :)
Awesome!! Post it to r/space
omg this was crazy! Thanks for this! :D
Vertigo alert!