Lighthouse Register

Lighthouse Register

Notes, photographs and logs from fifteen years of visiting coastal lights.

From the journal

The language of flashes

Every light has a rhythm of its own. A single flash every ten seconds, a group of three, an occlusion where th…

Nominal range and the honest range

The charts give a nominal range that assumes clear air and a certain lamp intensity. In haze that useful dista…

Stepped lenses

The Fresnel lens is a stair of glass that gathers light which would otherwise scatter upward or into the groun…

Keepers' logs

The logs were kept by the hour: wind, visibility, the minute the lamp was lit and the minute it was put out. T…

Automation

When the last keeper left, the light did not go out — it simply stopped being watched. A photocell lights it a…

A short gazetteer of coasts

A loose collection of mornings: the flat eastern sands where the light stands a mile inland now that the sea h…

From the gallery

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