You can have a fun and cool similar effect if you get a $10 infrared thermometer (I would say one with a laser for helping to point it). Useful for cooking and

You can have a fun and cool similar effect if you get a $10 infrared thermometer (I would say one with a laser for helping to point it). Useful for cooking and food safety. But then...go outside a night and point it first at the ground, then at any clouds, and then right up into darkness. You'll see a big drop in temperature, which is the absence of heat energy in the atmosphere itself...all the way out into space. I believe that the sensor has some type of angle to what it can detect, so you're getting the average reading across a large cone of air/space at that point. Also, the radiated heat along the depth of the cone would be "stacked", so that you are viewing a 'cumulative' reading from the entire depths of that cone, like an integral going into space.