Introducing LokLab: A Research Lab for the Night Sky

For as long as there have been humans, there have been humans looking up. Hipparchus catalogued a thousand stars from the island of Rhodes around 150 BCE, with positional precision no observer would match for sixteen centuries. Tycho Brahe spent twenty years on the island of Hven recording planetary positions to the limit of pre-telescopic instruments. Kepler turned Tycho's data into three laws that govern the motion of every body in the solar system. Galileo turned the first practical telescope toward Jupiter and found four moons. Hubble pointed a larger one at distant galaxies and found a universe that was getting bigger.

This is the lineage we work in. LokLab is an independent research lab devoted to the cosmos: the night sky as a physical object, the planets that move through it, the galaxy we live in, and the universe beyond.

What we publish

This site is the public record of the lab's work. Four kinds of output live here:

Research papers. Long-form writeups of original investigations into cosmic patterns, astronomical phenomena, and the historical record of observation. Every paper includes the hypothesis, the method, the sample size, the statistical results, and the limitations.

Experimental reports. Pre-registered studies: we declare a hypothesis in advance, score outcomes blind, and report whatever we find. The reporting standard is symmetric: a confirmed hypothesis gets the same treatment as a null result. We don't write null results in a different tone or bury them on a different page.

Methodology notes. Documentation of the computational and observational choices we make. Which ephemeris, which time standard, which coordinate system, which precision floor. Reproducibility starts with disclosure.

Sky reconstructions. Computed celestial configurations for moments of scientific significance. If we can correctly reconstruct the sky Galileo saw on January 7, 1610, that's evidence our pipeline is calibrated. If we can't, that's information too.

What we don't do

We don't make predictions about individual people. We don't sell readings, charts, or interpretations. We don't claim that planets influence personal events. We don't blur science into mysticism.

The cosmos is a physical system governed by gravitation, radiation, and a small number of fundamental constants. That system is interesting enough on its own that we don't need to import anything else. We are content to study the universe as the universe.

The standards we hold

We commit publicly to a small number of standards:

We publish null results. Most studies that fail to confirm their hypothesis are quietly shelved. We publish them at the same prominence as our positive findings. A non-result is still a result.

We document our methodology. Every computational decision is explained in the Methods section. If you want to replicate one of our calculations, the documentation should be sufficient.

We disclose limitations. Every paper includes a section on what could be wrong with our analysis, what samples we couldn't access, what confounds we couldn't control for. If we noticed a problem after publication, we publish a follow-up note.

We respond to challenges. If you find a methodological flaw, a calculation error, or a statistical mistake, write to us. Substantive challenges get substantive responses. Replication attempts get our raw data.

The lineage we work in

We build on the work of those who came before: Vedic astronomers of ancient India, the Babylonian observers of the Enuma Anu Enlil, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, the astronomers preserved through the Arabic and Persian translations, 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. We use the Swiss Ephemeris as our computational backbone, which itself draws on the JPL Development Ephemerides (DE441). None of this work is original to us. We are continuing a project that has been underway for at least four thousand years, and we credit our sources accordingly.

What's next

The first sky reconstruction we are publishing alongside this note is Galileo's first telescopic observation of Jupiter's moons on January 7, 1610. The reconstruction serves a methodological purpose: if our pipeline produces the correct historical sky, the pipeline is calibrated.

In parallel, we are beginning a series of pre-registered calibration studies, the first of which examines our pipeline's reproduction of the 1919 eclipse measurements that confirmed general relativity. Future reconstructions in development include Halley's 1682 comet return, the 1882 transit of Venus, and Hubble's 1929 redshift observations from Mount Wilson.

If you want to reach the lab, the address is contact@loklab.org. We expect to publish one to two pieces per month.

The sky is still up there. The mathematics still works. The questions are still worth asking. What we owe the inquiry is rigor.

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LokLab Research. Founded 2026. A record of looking up.