Yes, waited 6 years for an "authorized" second edition including 2 years beyond the "essentially finished" 2012 announcement. I think the official 2nd edition will probably be great - but the unofficial 2nd edition is better than the 1st - and it's available.
Yes, the text of the authorized 2nd edition was finished by the end of 2012. But that was the easy part. What was going to follow was the hard work of selecting and processing photos for the book, designing line-drawing illustrations and finder charts as well as a whole new atlas for the back, proof-reading, editing, compilation of an index, etc. Even given the fact that the photos, charts, and illustrations were going to be done by other people (Gerald Rhemann had agreeed to provide all the photos I would need for the book), this was going to be an awful lot of work, and since then I simply have not had the time because of all the academic publishing and English language tutoring I have had to do here in Vienna: I can't keep up with it.
However, I nevertheless would make the time to finished an authorized 2nd edition of Binocular Astronomy except for two things. First, when the original 1st edition of Binocular Astronomy was published, there was only one other full-length binocular observing guide on the market, Phil Harrington's Touring the Universe with Binoculars, and Phil's book is so different from mine that we can hardly be called competitors: our two books appeal to completely different sorts of readers and observers. However, now, two decades later, the market is crowded with binocular observing guides, most of which (in my not unbiased opinion) are not very good. It is a saturated market.
Second is the baleful influence of the internet. If you do a search on the internet for a specific object--say NGC 6231 in Scorpius--you will find literally hundreds of results covering everything from the cluster's appearance in binoculars and telescopes to astrophysical studies of it. But it is open to question how useful this pile of unconsolidated, undigested, unsynthesized data is to the average amateur astronomer: it's like having a heap of bricks dumped onto your front yard, and you're left with the job of building the house yourself. Unfortunately, from what I've seen and heard (especially on CN forums), many amateurs are content with this: more than once I've seen comments of the type "Why buy a book when you can get so much information from the internet?" It's hard to judge how many amateurs have this opinion; but it too is a factor in my decision to hold off with the 2nd edition of Binocular Astronomy for the present, given the fact that I have interesting alternative projects. For the moment I will continue to publish articles, not books. The text I have prepared for an authorized 2nd edition of Binocular Astronomy--especially the material on constellation history, which is from my own original research--is not going to go out of date soon anyway.
Craig Crossen
