Experiments with aluminum wire array Z pinches have been carried out on the mega-ampere generator for plasma implosion experiments (MAGPIE) at Imperial College London [I. H. Mitchell et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum. 67, 1533 (1996)]. It has been shown that in these arrays, there are two intense sources of radiation during stagnation; Al XII line emission from a precursor-sized object, and both continuum and Al XIII radiation from bright spots of either significantly higher temperature or density randomly distributed around this object so as to produce a hollow emission profile. Spatially resolved spectra produced by spherically bent crystals were recorded, both time-integrated and time-resolved, and were used to show that these two sources of radiation peak at the same time.