  Introductory physics and astronomy courses commonly use Wien's displacement
law to explain the colors of blackbodies, including the Sun and other stars, in
terms of their temperatures. We argue here that focusing on the peak of the
blackbody spectrum is misleading for three reasons. First, the Planck curve is
too broad for an individual spectral color to stand out. Second, the location
of the peak of the Planck curve depends on the choice of the independent
variable in the plot. And third, Wien's displacement law is seldom used in
actual practice to find a temperature and direct fitting to the Planck function
is preferable. We discuss these flaws and argue that, at the introductory
level, presentation of blackbody radiation in terms of photon statistics would
be more effective pedagogically. The average energy of the emitted photons
would then be presented in place of Wien's displacement law, and discussion of
the Stefan-Boltzmann law would include the total number of photons emitted per
second. Finally, we suggest that the Planck spectrum is most appropriately
plotted as a "spectral energy density per fractional bandwidth distribution,"
using a logarithmic scale for the wavelength or frequency.
