In June, we looked at the rugged San Juan Mountains of Southwestern Colorado where the Telluride Bluegrass Festival offers a music festival set in the beautiful mountains. This month for the Pléiades 1 – Pléiades Neo Point of Interest, we discover the history behind Castillo De San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida, which is the oldest permanently settled city in the United States.
About the Point of Interest: Castillo de San Marcos is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States. It is located on the western shore of Matanzas Bay in St. Augustine, Florida. It was designed by the Spanish engineer Ignacio Daza, with construction beginning in 1672, 107 years after the city’s founding by Spanish Admiral and conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, when Florida was part of the Spanish Empire. The fort’s construction was ordered by Gov. Francisco de la Guerra y de la Vega after a raid by the English privateer Robert Searles in 1668 that destroyed much of St. Augustine and damaged the existing wooden fort. The construction of the core of the current fortress was completed in 1695, although it has undergo many alterations and renovations over the centuries.
These two satellite images show the island from above. The Pléiades Neo 4 30-cm color image is from July 12, 2024, and shows the lay of the land and how the city was originally created around the historic fort. In the second photo, a Pléiades 1A 50-cm image captured January 3, 2025, you can see the growth of the community outward from the fort. These images have custom processing and color balancing applied by Apollo Mapping. PLEIADES © CNES 2025, Distribution Airbus DS.Fun Factoids: (1) When Britain gained control of Florida in 1763 pursuant to the Treaty of Paris, St. Augustine became the capital of British East Florida, and the fort was renamed Fort St. Mark until the Peace of Paris (1783), when Florida was transferred back to Spain and the fort’s original name was restored. (2) In 1819, Spain signed the Adams–Onís Treaty which ceded Florida to the United States in 1821; consequently, the fort was designated a United States Army base and renamed Fort Marion, in honor of American Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion. (3) The fort was declared a National Monument in 1924, and after 251 years of continuous military possession, it was deactivated in 1933. (4) The 20.48-acre (8.29 ha) site was subsequently turned over to the United States National Park Service. (5) In 1942 the original name, Castillo de San Marcos, was restored by an Act of Congress.
The 50-cm Pléiades 1 High-Resolution Satellite Constellation
The Pléiades 1 constellation (or at least part of it!) has been in orbit since December 2011 and if you have not had a chance to check out any sample imagery, take a few moments and have a look at the gallery on our website. If you work with high-resolution imagery, you should consider Pléiades 1 and Pléiades Neo for your next geospatial projects.
A variety of Pléiades 1 products are available from both a well-established archive and as a new collection, including 50-centimeter (cm) pansharpened imagery and 50-cm panchromatic – 2-meter (m) 4-band multispectral bundles. We are happy to discuss the technical specifications, pricing and tasking options available with both of these satellite constellations.
The 30-cm Pléiades Neo High-Resolution Satellite Constellation
Pléiades Neo is our newest high-resolution satellite constellation. The first Neo satellite went up in April 2021 and the second in August of the same year. This 30-centimeter resolution constellation will add two more satellites in the next few months and upgrade from daily to intraday revisits. Pléiades Neo has six multispectral bands with 1.2-meter resolution, including a deep blue and two infrared bands, along with a 30-centimeter resolution panchromatic band.
The archive is growing every day, and the satellites are available for new collections, making Pléiades Neo the perfect solution for site monitoring. Check out our beautiful sample images in the Pléiades Neo gallery.
More sample images and technical information about Pléiades 1 can be found on our website here; while the same can be found here for the Pléiades Neo constellation.
The Apollo Mapping sales team can answer any questions you might have about Pléiades 1 and/or Pléiades Neo. We can be reached at (303) 993-3863 or sales@apollomapping.com.
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