Show HN: An interactive map of US lighthouses and navigational aids

This reminded me of a friend of my dad’s from South Africa - Don (Donald) Devine, who bought into a the Lighthouse Depot years ago and rode the (then) lighthouse fad.

It was amazing seeing this successful large scale businessman turning his attention to a family business and growing that.

RIP to Don, my dad, and as I’ve just discovered, the business…

Nice app but it really needs to allow the user to select the lights of interest before it displays. As noted in a different thread it has a display limit of 500 points and you need to zoom in pretty tight to see anything pop up in some places, like the Great Lakes, due to huge number of lights that are in the populated list.

The legend should show the color coded lights and allow the user to toggle each light type as a layer so that they can identify specific points of interest.

It is functionally unusable in some areas due to the huge number of navigational buoys, etc along inland rivers and it apparently has a problem determining window extents and centering the display on the user's area of interest. If you display the entire Great Lakes region you will find that your displayed lights are along a couple of rivers in the lower left with nothing in the center of the display. If you shuffle to the north a bit and zoom another notch it suddenly fills the lower right corner, still with nothing in the center of the display.

Filtering by type of light would solve a lot of that if you keep the 500 point limit.

I understand that it took a lot to get this far. You are close to having a great app that I would be comfortable recommending to a friend who travels specifically to visit lighthouses. This is not that app yet but it could be.

Great work. Take that next step.

This is great! Interesting to see how many navigation lights there are besides the obvious ones.

Neat! Unfortunately the search/informational dialog blocks almost half the screen on mobile (iOS Safari). It also gets really slow when you zoom way out (e.g. when navigating to another state)

Very cool. One bug I noticed though is if you continue to zoom out you lose some and then all lights. Or it's almost like it only shows the first X lighthouses?

59,000 navigational aids is a lot more than I expected. Nice work turning the USCG Light List into something browsable.

I was surprised to find on an old USGS map (while researching a typo in the GNIS; it turns out the National Map Team is very responsive, they fixed the typo within 48 hours of reporting it) that there used to be Coast Guard navigation lights on the Ohio River. Makes perfect sense in hindsight, just never dawned on me that they would have responsibilities on large navigable rivers as well.

Very cool. I wish we could add to these if it was generated with LLM. I understand a disclosure would help, but it would make those who have spent much care and attention stand out immediately as opposed to during bug season

Nothing in Michigan? The state with the most light houses out of any in the US?

Neat!

These might be useful to integrate with:

OpenStreetMap (OSM) Wiki > OpenSeaMap: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenSeaMap

https://map.openseamap.org/

"Depth Data for Nautical Charts" https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/discussions/18116

Cool app.

Might want to warn about seizures and migraines, though. Some people are sensitive to flashing lights.

On Mac Safari, holding shift and using the magic mouse to scroll up or down reverses the zoom direction.

This is both right (Shift-X is the reverse of X due to convention) But is also wrong (Shift-Scroll is the macOS gesture for scrolling on maps where Scroll alone doesn't zoom in or out).

TLDR: I really wish Apple would adopt the "scroll up to zoom in" convention used by the rest of the free world.