In September, we looked at Janaki Mandir in Nepal. This month for the Pléiades 1 – Pléiades Neo Point of Interest, we check out Igloo City in rural Alaska.
Do you enjoy the high-resolution satellite imagery we post monthly in this article and elsewhere in The Geospatial Times? If so, head over to our Reddit subgroup, HighResSatelliteImage, where we post some our favorite high-resolution satellite images on a weekly basis.
About the Point of Interest: Igloo City in Cantwell, Alaska, rises four stories high in one of the most remotes states in the U.S. Sadly, the concrete hotel never opened for business. Today, it’s covered with graffiti, but when built in the 1970s, it couldn’t meet building codes and so it sat cold and empty, unused. Over the years, people have tried to revive the structure, get it up to code, and push it to flourish as an odd attraction. But no one has been truly successful.
These two satellite images show an aerial view of Igloo City. You can see the circular domed building surrounded by thick thatches of pine trees and one lonely road nearby. The 50-cm color Pléiades 1A image here was taken August 6, 2015; and randomly, the Pléiades Neo 4 30-cm color enhanced image featured here was also taken August 6, 2015. PLEIADES © CNES 2026, Distribution Airbus DS.
According to a 2021 Anchorage Daily News history of the Igloo, Leon Smith started building it as a hotel, but never completed the interior and eventually sold it to Brad Fisher. Fisher ran a gas station on the property until 2010 then decided to sell it.
Fun Factoids: (1) The four-story structure can be seen by airplanes at 30,000 feet – it’s that big. (2) While the exterior is impressive size wise, the interior was never completed. (3) Despite its unsuccessful journey to becoming a fun and funky hotel, plenty of visitors sneak in to check it out. (4) The hotel marks the halfway point between Fairbanks and Anchorage, Alaska’s two largest cities along Parks Highway. (5) In 2023, Shirley Schmidt announced that she and her uncle were leasing the foam-coated dome with plans to rebuild an old convenience store next to the Igloo, then construction a distillery on one half of the interior and then on the other half of the bottom floor, a restaurant and bar/tasting room. (6) The interior is completely unfinished and only framed out.
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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