re temperature of the dark sky does anyone have a reference something i can look up not just your own recollections i have a few of those myself on the temperature of the night sky as seen from space note i am not talking about the temperature of the microwave background radiation there are more things in the sky than just the mbr what i m after is total blackbody temperature what a thermal radiator would see disregarding or shielding against the sun and nearby large warm objects i m not sure if this will help you but the local interstellar radiation field has been measured and modeled by various groups if i remember things correctly the models involved contributions from three different bb sources so there s no obvious temperature of background radiation in our local area however the following references give the interstellar radiation density as a function of wavelength and you can integrate and average in an appropriate manner to get an effective temperature if you like witt and johnson astrophys j henry et al astrophys j mathis et al astron astrophys as you can see the references are out of date but they might get you started hope this helps julie
