I like the idea. But it was a bit jarring that panning with my finger took ages and then pinching to zoom insta-faceplanted me into the Labrador interior.
If anyone wants to mount a rescue, I’m somewhere near a lighthouse.
Funny enough I went into this site wondering if inland lighthouses were a thing; there are a few obvious cases, like the Netherlands using them to demarcate shoals and for navigation of inland waterways, but then there's whatever Germany's doing...
My favourite bit about people who use OpenStreetMap data for lighthouses is that they end up including <https://www.google.com/maps/@52.2647013,-2.1151705,51a,15y,2...> lighthouse in the exceptionally landlocked Droitwich (shows up as Hanbury Wharf Lighthouse)
They also often include "pairs" of lighthouses (high / low, front / rear) where newer ones have replaced older ones, but the older structure is still there (and often is now a museum), but isn't the active lighthouse.
Although this one has done a reasonable job at culling most of those out, at least on the south coast of England.
Sounding like desktop/laptop with a mouse is the only way to interact with this site. It's a great first try though. I spent a few minutes poking around for sure.
They are not in a busy part of the ocean, but I suppose it is to warn people away. That archipelago is not fully charted, so it is probably a good idea to keep away from much of its coast. Probably dozens of uncharted reefs.
Uncharted archipelagoes in 2026? Couldnt satellite imaging help with this? And I don't think it's near any shipping lanes theyre incredibly remote, theyre more likely there so the research vessels that enter the Port-aux-francais harbor can see the shore
My trusty M1 Max went full bonkers immediately. GPU temps spiked at 101°C and both CPU and CPU showed 100% workload. Also probably the first time this year the fans went on.
Here is the Icelandic list of lights (isl. Vitaskrá). It includes every light in Iceland. Sailors are supposed to know how to read this and identify a light from their patterns. It is very rear that sailors sail by lighthouses these days though, but an extremely handy skill to have in case your GPS fails for some reason.
It's cool data and I wish the person who prompted Claude to build this would have at least made an attempt to make it optimized and readable. Like, what does "Fl • every 5 s" mean? It's frustrating because this could have been amazing!
I checked the area near my house and there are about 10x more lighthouses shown than really exist. Some are buoys but most don’t correspond to anything.
It jumped around when I tried to use it on a mobile phone. I was surprised how few Greenland has.
I'm fairly sure that there are more in outlying islands of New Zealand. The Chatham Islands seem well marked but there are none marked on Stewart Island or the Snares.
Fun fact, there is a .gov effort to sell (or give away) a lot of old lighthouses in exchange for agreed maintenance. It's sort of a terrible deal, since you can't live in them or use them for commercial purposes, but you do still have to maintain it to a certain standard. But I'm sure someone is out there with the desire.
probably just to keep history alive. A lot of (very) wealthy people buy non-sense because they don't know what to do from their money. Then, why not buying a lighthouse :-)
This seems like it maps way more than just lighthouses. Looking at puget sound, at least, it seems to mark all the navigation buoys as lighthouses as well.
This map has very annoying and weird spelling errors, to the point where I suspect this is just AI generated.
Zooming in to the lights I am intimately familiar with in Suðurnes Iceland (includes the objectively best lighthouse in the World Reykjanesviti) I see “Garðskagaviti” correctly spelled, but the main lighthouse is spelled “Gardjskagi” that letter ð is also misspelled as dh in nearby Sandgerdhi.
Looks nice as already mentioned: pinch to zoom is broken (Firefox on Android here). Also: why am I shown a button labeled 'lighthouses in France' when I'm not actually looking at France?
Lovely idea, and a nostalgia trip for me. The sweeping looms brought back some old memories. I worked on merchant ships prior to getting into coding and was the officer of the watch one night crossing the Bay of Biscay going north. It was a clear night with that almost unnaturally still air you get at sea sometimes. I gradually noticed the loom of a lighthouse flashing over the sky just off the starboard bow. I wasn’t expecting landfall so soon and quickly double-checked our position on the chart. I counted the flashes; it was clearly the Phare du Créac'h on the Isle of Ushant. It’s stated as visible at 32 nautical miles, but I was seeing it at almost 90 nautical miles away. The light itself was still below the horizon, but the loom was clearly identifiable (there were no other lights in that area with the same number of flashes and frequency). It must have been some weird temperature inversion effect, but I have never forgotten it. I never saw any other lighthouse from that far away in the rest of my 25-odd years at sea.
AI generated with all the attendant quality problems - worst of all the data. There are a lot of non-lighthouses listed on the map, and I can easily come up with a couple of real lighthouses that aren't present.
I really hate all these vibecoded map projects, because the (debatably) slick looking UI implies that the real work of getting the data has been done. But it hasn't, whoever made this just made a bare minimum effort to slap in some plausible looking (if you don't look too close) data and then walked away. The fact that a lot of it is wrong doesn't matter if it looks good, right?
93 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 27.2 ms ] threadIf anyone wants to mount a rescue, I’m somewhere near a lighthouse.
Although this one has done a reasonable job at culling most of those out, at least on the south coast of England.
Looks like a bug with the view origin point being mis-matched with what the view's actually focused on - maybe high-DPI scale mis-match?
Lamentable if true. Speaking personally, I haven't touched a mouse in well over a decade.
My trusty M1 Max went full bonkers immediately. GPU temps spiked at 101°C and both CPU and CPU showed 100% workload. Also probably the first time this year the fans went on.
If you're trying to make an argumentum ad populum, well, there's a reason that's a logical fallacy.
https://www.lhg.is/media/sjomaelingar_islands/Vitaskra_31101...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_characteristic
I’m talking about the true lighthouse count. I understand there are some issues with this map.
I'm fairly sure that there are more in outlying islands of New Zealand. The Chatham Islands seem well marked but there are none marked on Stewart Island or the Snares.
The only two lights (they're not 'houses') on Stewart Island are actually on this map.
The Snares don't have any.
https://realestatesales.gov/our-listing/
They're like an anti-oasis: Signaling a welcome patch of land in an endless ocean :)
The Lighthouse is also one of the best movies ever period.
There should be some indie games based on lighthouses!
Among various datasets, it has OSM data (all of it): https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=OSM&zoom=4&lat=52.3756&lng=2.5...
And here are lighthouses: https://adsb.exposed/?dataset=OSM&zoom=3&lat=40.0444&lng=9.9...
Zooming in to the lights I am intimately familiar with in Suðurnes Iceland (includes the objectively best lighthouse in the World Reykjanesviti) I see “Garðskagaviti” correctly spelled, but the main lighthouse is spelled “Gardjskagi” that letter ð is also misspelled as dh in nearby Sandgerdhi.
The source for these lights are here https://www.lhg.is/media/sjomaelingar_islands/Vitaskra_31101... and I honestly don‘t know why whichever AI was used to generate this didn’t just copy paste the names from the registry.
It also annoyingly includes old and spare lights, towers, etc. and doesn’t label them as such.
I really hate all these vibecoded map projects, because the (debatably) slick looking UI implies that the real work of getting the data has been done. But it hasn't, whoever made this just made a bare minimum effort to slap in some plausible looking (if you don't look too close) data and then walked away. The fact that a lot of it is wrong doesn't matter if it looks good, right?