Nirupama Raghavan was the first woman in the field of observational astronomy in India. On her family's return to India from the United States in 1982, she joined the Nehru Planetarium in New Delhi. The astrophysicists
Priyamvada Natarajan and
Sangeeta Malhotra as students were among those who were active in the association and conducted research with her. In the 1990s, she initiated a programme of telescope construction techniques with Chander Devgun for schools in New Delhi. She taught astrophysics at the
Indian Institutes of Technology at Kanpur and
Delhi. Nirupama Raghavan published works in atmospheric science, especially in relation to the spread of pollutants. Her other major interest was in
archaeo-astronomy. Among her contributions here was the identification of Arudra (the red star of the god Shiva) with
Betelgeuse, and the coincidence of the festival of Arudra Darsinam at
Chidambaram with the ascent of
Orion in December. She also showed evidence that the stellar arrangement of Orion provided the template for
Chola bronze sculptures of
Nataraja. Another observation was on the likely consecration of the Valleswarar Temple in
Mylapore,
Chennai to have been on 6 June 1761, exactly upon the transit of
Venus (
Valle being the
Tamil name for the planet, to which the temple was dedicated). ==Selected works==