In June, we looked at Tulip Town Garden Center and Roozengaarde at the 2023 Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in the state of Washington. This month for the Pléiades 1 – Pléiades Neo Point of Interest, we stay in the USA to check out Dollywood in Tennessee.

These two satellite images show the different parks within Dollywood. The rollercoasters and rides can be traced from above while buildings that house the shows, activities, entertainment and more can be identified. Image one is a 30-cm photo captured by Pléiades Neo 3 on June 22, 2022. The second image is a 50-cm image captured by Pléiades P1A on May 21, 2021. These images have custom processing and color balancing applied by Apollo Mapping. PLEIADES © CNES 2024, Distribution Airbus DS.

About the Point of Interest: Named the No. 1 theme park in the world by Amusement Today in 2023, Dollywood Parks & Resorts features rides at the theme park, entertainment, shopping, special events, an assortment of accommodations, food and fun nestled within the Great Smoky Mountains. There are more than 40 rides and attractions, a waterpark, countless artists and shows, along with different events every season including the Food and Flower Festival featuring more than 1 million flowers and mosaicultures in the spring. During the summer, Dollywood’s Splash Country offers the perfect way to cool off. The Smoky Mountain Summer Celebration also includes a fireworks extravaganza. In the fall comes the Harvest Festival, a family event with the great pumpkin luminights and hoot owl hollow. Wintertime brings a Smoky Mountain Christmas with more than six million twinkling lights to usher in the holidays.

Fun Factoids: (1) Dollywood hosts nearly 3 million guests in a typical season from mid-March to the Christmas holidays. (2) The park site originally opened in early 1961 as a small tourist attraction owned by the Robbins brothers from Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Named “Rebel Railroad,” it included a steam train, general store, blacksmith shop and saloon. (3) In 1977, the Herschends renamed Goldrush to “Silver Dollar City Tennessee,” making it a sister park to their original Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. (4) In 1986, Dolly Parton, who grew up in the area, bought an interest in Silver Dollar City. As part of the deal, the park reopened for the 1986 season as “Dollywood.” In 2010, Parton said she became involved with the operation because she, “always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area.” (5) In October 2019, it was announced that the park would add its first new festival in 14 years. Dollywood’s Flower & Food Festival featured 10 to 15-foot-tall topiaries based on Dolly’s songs like “Coat of Many Colors,” colorful photo opportunities, a rainbow sky over Showstreet and delicious eats. (6) On August 5, 2022, it was announced that a new rollercoaster named Big Bear Mountain was under construction and opened on May 12, 2023. It is also the longest rollercoaster in the park’s history.

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.