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An interactive map of US lighthouses and navigational aids

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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.

HN · launched Jan 25, 2026 · 102 upvotes (top 10%) · 0 views

Niche: interactive mapping platforms · 191 launches, 16 in the last 7 days ▲ +7% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Analytics & BI
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 191 launches in interactive mapping platforms →

Could you build this?

Yes It is a geospatial map frontend (e.g., Mapbox/Leaflet) rendering parsed open public data from the US Coast Guard Light List publication.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: NOAA nautical charts, OpenSeaMap

Concerns raised: UI overlay blocks too much screen on mobile, Display limit of 500 points causes missing data in dense areas, Performance slowdown when zooming out far, Search bar hijacks screen space on mobile, Great Lakes region data missing/misaligned

Feature requests: Filter/toggle navigational lights by type as layers, Expand light descriptions (e.g., 'Fl Red 3' → 'Flashing red light every 3 seconds'), Dismiss or minimize overlay on mobile, Add non-USCG racing buoys to database, Allow user filtering before displaying all lights

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 102 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #16 of 103 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 64 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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