Richard Martin West

Richard Martin West (born 1941) is a Danish astronomer with a long career at the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

He discovered numerous comets, including Comet West (C/1975 V1), which was one of the brightest comets of the 1970s, and the periodic comets 76P/West–Kohoutek–Ikemura and 123P/West–Hartley.

He also discovered a number of asteroids, including the Trojan asteroids 2146 Stentor, 2148 Epeios and (20995) 1985 VY.

He co-discovered (with Hans-Emil Schuster) the Phoenix Dwarf galaxy.

Career at ESO

Richard West began working at ESO in 1970, when he joined as Assistant Astronomer to the ESO Director General, Adriaan Blaauw. 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.

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.