In studying temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background Weinberg has noted that some ease of calculation and insight can be achieved by looking at the structure of the perturbed light cone on which the perturbed photons propagate. In his approach Weinberg worked in a specific gauge and specialized to fluctuations around the standard Robertson-Walker cosmological model with vanishing spatial three-curvature. In this paper we generalize this analysis by providing a gauge invariant treatment in which no choice of gauge is made, and by considering geometries with non-vanishing spatial three-curvature. By using the scalar, vector, tensor fluctuation basis we find that the relevant gauge invariant combinations that appear in the light cone temperature fluctuations have no explicit dependence on the spatial curvature even if the spatial curvature of the background geometry is nonvanishing. We find that a not previously considered, albeit not too consequential, temperature fluctuation at the observer has to be included in order to enforce gauge invariance. As well as working with comoving time we also work with conformal time in which a background metric of any given spatial three-curvature can be written as a time-dependent conformal factor (the comoving time expansion radius as written in conformal time) times a static Robertson-Walker geometry of the same spatial three-curvature. For temperature fluctuations on the light cone this conformal factor drops out identically. Thus the gauge invariant combinations that appear in the photon temperature fluctuations have no explicit dependence on either the conformal factor or the spatial three-curvature at all.

21 pages. Final version, to appear in Phys. Rev. D