The science of thermal photon emission occupies a very prominent place in the history of physics. As every science student knows, we owe Planck’s constant and the birth of quantum mechanics to work on precisely this problem. And just as many other macroscopic phenomena have small particles analogues, so does radiation. There is a rich literature on the emission of thermal infrared radiation from molecules, partly driven by the desire to understand astrophysical phenomena. There has been considerably less interest in the thermal part of the bluer side of the electromagnetic spectrum. Presumably this priority has been motivated by the expectation that high energy excitations will not happen in small systems by thermal means, and visible photons therefore not emitted thermally.