Is the heat given off by your palm blackbody radiation?

Question

Is the heat given off by your palm blackbody radiation?

Answer 1

Much of the heat given off by your body is black body radiation.

FLIR (Forward looking infrared) cameras use black body radiation to determine the temperature of the object that they are looking at.  Since a human is typically much hotter than their environment they light up quite well on FLIR cameras.

These cameras only look at a particular range of wavelengths and integrate the values into a scalar.  This causes some problems for the cameras because radiation that isn't black body radiation can make the object appear hotter than it really is.  Also, if the material has a lot thermal emissivity it can appear colder than it really is.