https://beacons.schmirler.de/history.html
As a regular visitor to the beautiful North Sea island of Amrum, I've always been fascinated by the flashing lights on the sea at night. So, one day I found myself standing in the dark on the Wittdün observation dune. The beam of a lighthouse regularly flickered across the horizon. Perhaps Heligoland? Wouldn't it be nice to have a map of lighthouses at hand? Of course, hardly any landlubber like myself (and probably not every seasoned sailor either) has a nautical chart readily available. Why not use the ubiquitous internet? And so the idea of a map based on Google Maps showing all the lighthouses was born.
The initial euphoria quickly faded, however, when it came to obtaining the data on the lighthouses. Unexpected help came from overseas. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) generally permits the reuse of data from the NGA List of Lights, online version , provided that a corresponding disclaimer is displayed.
No sooner said than done. The relevant data was imported and processed. Unfortunately, it turned out that the NGA data for the German Bight was not very up-to-date and far from complete. No matter – a start had been made, and without this data, the entire project would never have been possible. I was all the more pleased that I was able to supplement the data set with official data (BSH) shortly afterward. The main task now was to compare the positions of the lights with the aerial photographs from Google Maps as far as possible. In tricky cases, Alexander Trabas's online List of Lights was a great help. Anyone who wants to get a true picture of lighthouses worldwide will find his remarkable and extensive photo collection invaluable. The lights shown on the "German Bight" map can be found in section B – Germany .
What was still missing were the many, many lighted buoys. Over the years, more and more data on buoys has been collected in OpenStreetMap , especially through the linked projects Freie Tonne and OpenSeaMap , so this gap is slowly beginning to fill. These projects are also grateful recipients of corrections and missing navigational aid data. I would be delighted if some visitors to my site could contribute something to these projects and thus indirectly to my website. My special thanks go to the tireless mappers!
