A research project devoted to the night sky and the structure of the universe.

LokLab studies the cosmos the way astronomers always have, by paying close attention to the sky, writing down what we see, and checking our work against what came before. We use the same ephemeris mathematics that observatories and space agencies use for navigation and prediction, and we apply it to the questions that drew people to the stars in the first place. Where are we? What is out there? How does the universe move?

The lab is a small operation devoted to looking up carefully and writing the results down honestly. Everything we publish, from a one-line correction to a full reconstruction, lives at the same URL pattern, with the same standards of disclosure. There is no editorial board and no peer review on this site. There is also no advertising, no tracking, and no paywall.

What we do

The lab's work falls into four categories.

Empirical experiments. Pre-registered studies that test quantitative astronomical claims using blind procedures, control samples, and standard statistical methods. We publish every result, including the ones that fail to confirm the hypothesis. The honest reporting of null results is, in our view, the single most underprovided service in popular cosmology writing.

Historical sky reconstruction.We compute precise sky configurations at moments of scientific significance: Galileo's first telescopic observation of Jupiter's moons, Tycho's 1572 supernova, Kepler's 1604 supernova, Halley's comet returns, the 1919 eclipse that confirmed general relativity, Hubble's 1929 redshift measurements. Each reconstruction is verifiable against any modern ephemeris.

Methodology documentation.Every computational choice we make (which time standard, which coordinate system, which precision floor, which reference frame) is publicly documented and reviewable. If you can't reproduce our work from our documentation, we have failed.

Cosmic-pattern analysis. Quantitative investigation of patterns in the night sky and beyond: Milky Way structure, planetary motion, galactic distribution, cosmic-ray timing. Where data is available, we examine it. Where claims have been made without data, we say so.

What we don't do

This site publishes research, not readings. We don't offer personal chart services or interpretations here. Everything on these pages is designed to be reproduced, challenged, and corrected. The cosmos is a physical system governed by gravitation, radiation, and a small number of fundamental constants. The questions that system raises are interesting enough on their own.

How to read our work

Research posts include the hypothesis, the method, the sample, the result, and the limitations. Methodology notes explain why we chose what we chose. Experimental writeups disclose pre-registration where applicable, scoring procedures, and full effect sizes. Sky reconstructions list source ephemerides and computational parameters.

If a post says “null result,” it means we tested something and it didn't work. That is information, and we publish it at the same prominence as a positive finding. The full archive of references and datasets the lab leans on is documented at /bibliography.

Lineage

The history of attentive sky-observation is older and broader than the names a typical astronomy textbook lists. We build on a long lineage that includes the Babylonian observers who compiled the Enuma Anu Enlil, Vedic astronomers of ancient India, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, the Chinese astronomers whose continuous record stretches across two thousand years, the scholars whose work was preserved through Arabic and Persian translation, Aryabhata, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, William Herschel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Friedrich Bessel, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Edwin Hubble, and Carl Sagan.

The full essay on what each tradition contributed, framed in the way the historical record actually supports, lives at /predecessors. Carl Sagan acknowledged the ancient Indian cosmological tradition directly in Cosmos (1980, Episode 10), noting that its time scales are the only ones in the ancient world that align with modern scientific cosmology. We mention this where appropriate. The lineage is not a religious claim. It is the historical record.

Our computational backbone is the Swiss Ephemeris (Astrodienst), which itself draws on the JPL Development Ephemerides (DE441). Our reference frame conventions follow the IAU. Every dataset and tool we depend on is credited in the documentation.

The lab

LokLab was founded in 2026 as an independent research effort. We work on the open internet, publish without paywalls, and welcome collaboration with researchers in astronomy, statistics, history of science, and computational science.

For correspondence, methodology questions, or replication requests, write to contact@loklab.org.

All published work is provided for research and educational purposes. Methodology is open. Code paths are documented. We invite challenge, replication, and correction.