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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.