The effects of finite field of view of observing instruments on the inversion of infrared thermal emission measurements are examined. Analytical and numerical techniques are discussed for calculation of the weighting functions and for retrieval of temperature and constituent distributions from thermal emission observations with a finite field of view. Calculations and plots of the weighting functions with various instrumental fields of view are presented. Results for retrieval of temperature and constituent profiles from synthetic limb radiance data with a finite field of view are given.