Summaryedit

This image was acquired by Landsat 5’s Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor. This is a natural-colour image made using red, blue, and green wavelengths (TM bands 3, 2, and 1). Vegetation is green, grey areas are exposed rock or concrete structures, permanent snow is white, while much of the exposed ground is barren and brown. Since late December is well into summer in the Southern Hemisphere, all but the permanent snow-caps on the mountains has melted away.

Licensingedit

Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse

	This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
	Warnings: Use of NASA logos, insignia and emblems is restricted per U.S. law 14 CFR 1221. The NASA website hosts a large number of images from the Soviet/Russian space agency, and other non-American space agencies. These are not necessarily in the public domain. Materials based on Hubble Space Telescope data may be copyrighted if they are not explicitly produced by the STScI.[1] See also {{PD-Hubble}} and {{Cc-Hubble}}. The SOHO (ESA & NASA) joint project implies that all materials created by its probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use. [2] Images featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) web site may be copyrighted. [3] The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) site has been known to host copyrighted content even though its photo gallery FAQ states that all of the images in the photo gallery are in the public domain.

Annotations

This image is annotated: View the annotations at Commons

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Cerro Aconcagua

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Plaza de Mulas

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810

60

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Horcones River

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90

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Laguna de Horcones

In this image, the mountain and the ridge-line of the Andes dominates the scene. Vegetation in the area rarely grows at elevations above 4,000 meters, so this natural-colour scene centred on the river valley of the Horcones River appears very barren. The ridge-line to the west (left in this image) marks the international border with Chile and Argentina, and although Aconcagua is taller than any of the ridge-line mountains, much of the moisture from the humid Pacific air is already wrung from the atmosphere before reaching Argentina, leaving a “rain shadow” which makes the climate around Aconcagua relatively arid. The image also shows a wider area around the mountain, including Santiago, the Chilean capital city, to the south and east of the mountain.