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

This is an interactive map of US navigational aids and lighthouses, which indicates their location, color, characteristic and any remarks the Coast Guard has attached.

I was sick at home with the flu this weekend, and went on a bit of a Wikipedia deep dive about active American lighthouses. Searching around a bit, it was very hard to find a single source or interactive map of active beacons, and a description of what the "characteristic" meant. The Coast Guard maintains a list of active lights though, that they publish annually (https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/light-list-annual-publication). With some help from Claude Code, it wasn't hard to extract the lat/long and put together a small webapp that shows a map of these light stations and illustrates their characteristic with an animated visualization..

Of course, this shouldn't be used as a navigational aid, merely for informational purposes! Though having lived in Seattle and San Francisco I thought it was quite interesting.

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?

an hour agomkw5053

For performance reasons, it only renders the first 500. There should be a message across the bottom which shows the number shows and the total number?

37 minutes agoidd2

Cool app.

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

5 minutes agoRickJWagner

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.