In March, we looked at potash evaporation ponds near Moab, Utah. This month for the Pléiades 1 – Pléiades Neo Point of Interest, we check out Plasencia Auditorium and Congress Center in Spain.
About the Point of Interest: Built in 2017, the Plasencia Auditorium and Congress Center sits on the boundary between the nearest town and the countryside on the outskirts of Plasencia. The building can be seen from the distance, its luminous exterior seemingly glowing.
These two satellite images show an aerial view of the Plascencia Auditorium and Congress Center in Spain. In the first image here, Pléiades Neo 3 30-cm color data from July 4, 2023, we can see the gleaming translucent auditorium and conference center with dull brown ground nearby and other colorful buildings a stone’s throw away. The second sample here, a 50-cm Pléiades 1A color image taken August 12, 2023, the image captures a larger area given its lower resolution. These images have custom processing and color balancing applied by Apollo Mapping. PLEIADES © CNES 2026, Distribution Airbus DS. Fun Factoids: (1) In the entrance lobby there is a secondary hall for 300 people, which can be divided into three for 100 spectators each, additional exhibition halls and a restaurant area. (2) The entrance is on the urbanized side of the building at street level, more than 17 meters above the lowest part of the building, using an orange gangway that arrives at a 12 meters deep vertical canyon in the same color, where the view of the countryside, i.e. the spurs of the Gata Range, are heightened. (3) Rather than fill in the site, the architects created a cantilevered shape to hover over the rocky terrain. (4) Architecture critic and curator Beatrice Galilee (b. 1982) describes the building as “part chrysalis, part meteorite – an extraordinary luminous center designed by wrapping all of the functions of a theatre, a dance hall, an exhibition space and conference auditoriums into a tight ball.” (5) Created by Spanish firm SelgasCano, the Plasencia Auditorium was designed to make as small a footprint as possible in every sense. Of the building’s 86,000-square-foot volume, only 4,300 feet touch the ground, whilst the translucent “skin” – made of the durable, air-filled plastic ETFE – is self-cleaning and easy to install, barely adding any weight to construction and offering up to 45 percent reductions in solar heat gain. (6) Shaped like a giant boulder, the multifaceted building is wrapped in a translucent skin of ETFE panels that floods the interior with natural light during the day and glows like a lantern when illuminated from within at night. In contrast to its pale exterior, the interior is dominated with vibrant colors — from a bright orange entry hall to a deep red auditorium — that heighten the structure’s ethereal feel.
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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