Together with Hans-Emil Schuster, he co-discovered the Phoenix Dwarf galaxy.
He completed high school in 1959 and then achieved a degree in astronomy and astrophysics from University of Copenhagen in 1964.
His career took a leap in 1972, when he charged one of the first and largest scientific programmes of ESO: the Sky Atlas Laboratory project to systematically map the southern hemisphere.
[3] West was a leading figure in helping out and establishing serious collaborations with the scientific communities of the Central and Eastern European countries in the wake of the political, social and economical turmoil following the collapse and dismantling of the Soviet block in the early 1990s.
[3] Richard West focussed a lot of his worklife on the organizational matters of the international scientific community in addition to science communications in general.