We are witnessing a large increase in satellite generated data especially in the form of images. Hence intelligent processing of the huge amount of data received by dozens of earth observing satellites, with specific satellite image oriented approaches, presents itself as a pressing need. Content based satellite image retrieval (CBSIR) approaches have mainly been driven so far by approaches dealing with traditional images. In this paper we introduce a novel approach that refines image retrieval process using the unique properties to satellite images. Our approach uses a Query by polygon (QBP)...