In April, we looked at the Plasencia Auditorium and Congress Center in Spain. This month for the Pléiades 1 – Pléiades Neo Point of Interest, we check out St. Michael’s Mount in England.

About the Point of Interest: St. Michael’s Mount in England is an island that’s a civil parish and linked to the town of Marazion by a causeway of granite setts, passable (as is the beach) between mid-tide and low water. It is managed by the National Trust, and the castle and chapel have been the home of the St. Aubyn family since around 1650. St. Michael’s Mount is one of 43 unbridged tidal islands accessible by foot from mainland Britain. Part of the island was designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest in 1995 for its geology. Sea height can vary by up to ~5 meters (16 feet) between low and high tide.

These two satellite images show an aerial view of St. Michael’s Mount in England. In the 30-cm Pléiades Neo  4 color image from June 14, 2022, we can see low tide exposing a vast stretch of beach and the full cobbled walkway from the mainland to the island. In the 50-cm Pléiades 11 color image taken July 17, 2021, high tide can be seen with the beach blanketed by the water and the walkway submerged. These images have custom processing and color balancing applied by Apollo Mapping. PLEIADES © CNES 2026, Distribution Airbus DS.

At low tide, visitors can use the ancient causeway to walk across to the island. The causeway is cobbled, uneven and tricky to navigate. The island has its own website that maps out high tide and low tide for optimal visits. At high tide, the sea covers the causeway, but at low tide, the causeway is open for around four hours each day, depending on the tides and weather. Visitors will need around 15 minutes to walk the length of the causeway.

The chapel of St Michael, a 15th Century building, has an embattled tower, one angle of which is a small turret which served for the guidance of ships. The mount also has been featured in a number of films, including the 1979 film Dracula, the 1983 James Bond film Never Say Never Again, the 2003 film Johnny English, the 2012 fantasy adventure film Mariah Mundi and the Midas Box, and the 2021 Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon.

Fun Factoids: (1) St. Michael’s Mount means “hoar rock in woodland.” (2) St Michael’s Mount is believed to have been the site of a monastery from the 8th to the early 11th Centuries. (3) By 1811, there were 53 houses and four streets. The pier was extended in 1821 and the population peaked in the same year, when the island had 221 people. There were three schools, a Wesleyan chapel, and three public houses, mostly used by visiting sailors. (4) The 1755 Lisbon earthquake caused a tsunami to strike the Cornish coast over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away. The sea rose six feet in 10 minutes at St Michael’s Mount, ebbed at the same rate, and continued to rise and fall for five hours. (5) There is evidence of people living in the area during the Neolithic between around 4000 and 2500 BC. The key discovery was of a leaf-shaped flint arrowhead in a shallow pit on the lower eastern slope, now part of the gardens. (6) Remains of ancient trees uncovered by storms can be seen at low tides in Mount’s Bay, which was submerged in 1700 BC.

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.