Book Recommendations

[KenMiller]

I am looking for recommendations for books on astronomy.

My primary interest related to astronomy is astrophotography. I feel I have a pretty good handle on the "photography" part of that.

But in my ongoing effort to establish a good imaging platform I have encountered a number of concepts and jargon that leave me baffled, despite attempts at researching using on-line resources.

For example, "Plate Solution." This term is so frequently used without clarification that I must be the only one who has no idea what it really means.

As best as I can determine, it is a means by which an image of stars is compared to another "catalog" image, taking into account the necessary information to do the mapping of the actual 3-D coordinates of the stars to a 2-D plane (probably including current position of Earth in space?).

I presume this is a fundamental astronomical technique that would be documented in detail in a textbook?

What's the name of that book?

And, what other texts would serve me well in an effort to procure a better fundamental understanding of astronomy?

[pizwiz]

Ken,
I may be way off on this, but I have looked at several of the web sites associated with various sky surveys. Even though I did not read much of the technical info, they go into quite an amount of detail on these images and their specs. Maybe the info you seek is buried in there?
Just a guess.

Adolph