Originally published at: Interactive world map of lighthouses | Boing Boing
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Respect to landlocked Austria for its impressive lighthouse tally.
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Whoever created the map must have an axe to grind against Michigan, which alone has 129 lighthouses!
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It looks like the map doesn’t reflect all the US lighthouse. For instance, Maine has 65 and Florida has 30. Also it would be nice if there was a legend.
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It’s a Eurocentric map. NC doesn’t have dozens of lights anymore, but it does have more than just the one at Hatteras.
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Yep, lots of United States lighthouses missing. But that’s fine, it feels like this map has been setup starting with a European focus. Maybe they’ll add more as they go.
What it’s really lacking is the ability to click on a light and see info about the lighthouse, maybe a land view of the structure itself, link to a website about it, guide to visiting hours if its open to the public, etc. That would be totally cool.
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I enjoyed seeing this documentary about Lighthouses.
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Norway has ≈ 100,000 km of coastline. Plenty of room for lighthouses.
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You do mean a Ghost Story Mind Fk about light houses right?
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This map claims there’s a lighthouse in NYC between La Guardia and the Riker’s Island Bridge. I can’t find any evidence that such a lighthouse exists. It’s possible I haven’t looked hard enough, but so far nothing. However, the beacon is placed directly over the Elmjack Little League baseball park, which was described last summer metaphorically as a “a lighthouse and a beacon for the young people of Queens” (source). Not sure what to make of that—a machine learning algorithm mistake?
ETA: Just checked the Github, and the data is a few years old, so probably not a weird ML algo mistake. The beacon is supposed to be at 40.7758335, -73.8896862, but there’s just trees and a construction site there. I’m guessing there was a literal lighthouse there, and it was demolished to build a metaphorical lighthouse. Which is cool.
I’m sad that they didn’t include the Little Red Lighthouse under the GW Bridge—it’s adorable!
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My aunt-in-law is a lighthouse fiend; an area’s lighthouse(s) are always part of her vacation plans. And this was the obvious Value Add missed in this. Even a simple clickable link to a google maps for $name / $LatLong. Because it is ‘possible’ she might learn of a previously unknown [to her] site, but being able to click through and review would have been a real win for her.
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I have a “lighthouse” tattoo that I’m very fond of.
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There aren´t lighthouses in great part of South Atlantic according to this map…
I don’t think the locations are accurate for some. For instance the three lighthouses at the mouth of the River Tyne should be (I know they are) located at the ends of the piers on either side, not about eight miles up river as shown here
… but the lighthouses at the mouths of the Blyth and Wear, just up and down the coast, are correct
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It’s missing some in Europe too - South Stack on Anglesey (Wales) is missing, for a start.
Eight miles! That’s beyond inaccurate. I really hope this data isn’t used by actual nautical navigation systems.
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I did something like this recently for work, but instead of lighthouses it was pulsars. Which are kind of like lighthouses, if you go really fast in space and have eyes that can see in radio waves.
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Oddly, the one shown isn’t located at Hatteras but somewhere around Manteo (huh, the Roanoke Marshes Light is there - wonder if that’s the one they meant to map).
They’ve also missed a ton in and around the Chesapeake. Where one is shown, up at the north end, there isn’t even a lighthouse. There’s one nearby on Turkey Point but their placement is way off.
I’d like a refund. 
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