Pelorus: terms, privacy and credits

Pelorus is a free, non-commercial live map of the UK coast.

Last updated 15 November 2026

Not for navigation or emergencies. Pelorus is an information map. Positions can be late, wrong or missing, and many boats and aircraft are not shown at all. Do not use it to navigate, to plan a rescue or to rely on for your safety. In an emergency at sea or on the coast, call 999 and ask for the Coastguard, or call on VHF channel 16.

Terms of use

You may use Pelorus for personal, non-commercial purposes. Please do not scrape it or use it to run your own service.
It is provided as it is, with no promise that it will be available, accurate or complete. To the extent the law allows, the operator is not liable for loss or harm that comes from using it.
The map shows craft that broadcast their position (aircraft ADS-B, ships AIS). It identifies police, Coastguard, ambulance and lifeboat craft from their callsigns, registrations and names, which can be wrong. A "possibly on task" note is a guess from movement only.
An emergency squawk alert means a pilot selected that code. It does not say what has happened. Please do not share it as news of an incident.
Be careful with what you do with sea marks, tides and weather shown here. They come from public models and volunteer maps, and are not official charts or forecasts.
These terms may change. Using Pelorus after a change means you accept the new version.

Privacy

What stays on your device. Your settings, dropped pins, captured bearings and the 24 hour emergency log are stored in your browser. Photos you take with the camera view are saved to your own device and are not sent to us.

What is sent to the server. To show a map around you, the app sends the centre of the map (your GPS position if you choose to use it, or a point you pick) and the search radius. The server passes that map centre on to the aircraft, vessel, weather and sea services listed below. When you open a card, the craft's registration or name is also sent to a photo lookup. Like any website, the server and the hosting provider can see your IP address and the time of each request.

What we do not do. There are no accounts, no adverts, no analytics and no tracking cookies. We do not sell or share your data. The app does not store your position in a database or write it to its own logs, although the hosting provider's own server logs may record the addresses requested.

Third parties. Your browser fetches map tiles and some images directly from other services (Esri, OpenStreetMap, OpenSeaMap, Wikimedia and the Leaflet library host). Those services can see your IP address and which tiles you view, under their own policies. Location, camera and compass are used only when you allow them in your browser, and you can turn them off in your browser settings at any time.

Your rights. Because the app does not keep personal data about you, there is nothing to look up or delete on our side. Clear your browser's site data to remove everything stored on your device.

Data sources and credits

Pelorus combines free public data. Thank you to everyone who runs it. Most of these services allow non-commercial use only and ask for credit.

Data	Source
Aircraft positions	Volunteer ADS-B networks: adsb.lol, adsb.fi and airplanes.live
Vessel positions	AISStream (AIS)
Weather, sea state and tides	Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0)
Map and sea marks	© OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), OpenSeaMap, via the Overpass API
Ocean base map	Esri, GEBCO, NOAA, National Geographic, DeLorme, HERE, Geonames.org and other contributors
Aircraft and ship photos	Wikimedia Commons, each under its own licence, with the photographer credited on the card
Map software	Leaflet

Pelorus is not connected to HM Coastguard, the RNLI, the police, the NHS or any air ambulance charity.