Using NASA's radiance calculator to make a graph to find the where the peak radiation emission are?

Question

I am trying to graphically show the radiance emissions of both the Sun and Earth. I am using NASA's radiance calculator then going to graph it on paper.

Here is what I typed in:

Low wavelength: 0.1μm

high wavelength: 100.0μm

Plot 1:

Temp: 5778k <- for the sun's avg temp

Emissivity: 1.00 <- was unsure what this was for

Plot 2:

Temp: 274.03 <- for the Earth's avg temp

Emissivity:

x-axis scale: log

y-axis scale: log

Here is what that all looks like:

As far as making a plot of the emitted energy of the Sun and the emitted energy of Earth on the same graph does this look correct? How might one annotate/label the curves to show where the peak emission occurs?

Should the x or y axis be dialed down they are between 0.1 to 100.0 and then the y-axis sale 0.01 to 10.000

I appears that the Suns peak emission is between 0.32 - 10.00microns and the Earth is 10.00microns.

Thank you

Answer 1

The graph looks correct, and after having a look at the NASA/USGS Radiance calculator, it seem that curves can't be annotated. However, below the plot there is a button to download the source data of the plot as a comma separated file (CSV), that you can open in Excel or any spreadsheet manager program and plot it with annotations and all the customization you want.

For the wavelength of the peak in emission you don't have to look further than the box below the graph titled "Wavelength of Maximum Radiance", which for the Sun should say something like 0.52 micrometers as in the screenshot below: