An interactive map of US lighthouses and navigational aids
Details
- External ID
- 46756427
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- An interactive map of US lighthouses and navigational aids
- Website domain
- lighthouses.app
- Launched
- Jan. 25, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 102
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9018445322793149
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- space and geospatial visualization tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Analytics & BI
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- interactive map of us lighthouses
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 56 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #9 of 57 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 46 days after the earliest competitor.
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- clearwater-vrc · github · 2026-09-28 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.35
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.