Richard was a major graze observer and organizer and did extensive work with grazes and occultations in the 80's and 90's in the Kansas City area. He and Craig and Terry McManus (former IOTA Treasurers) were the first in IOTA to put together an image intensifier in the 90's to reach fainter asteroid events.

Richard has also done numerous TV interviews to introduce upcoming occultation events. He published a labeled version of "The Marginal Zone of the Moon" from Chester Watt’s original charts of the lunar topography in 2008 and published an extensive article on "Lunar Grazing Occultations" in the Encyclopedia of Lunar Science in 2018.

His Sky & Telescope articles: ”Mapping Asteroid Shapes by Video”, “Observing a Solar Eclipse from the Edge”, (plus numerous other articles on bright and dark nebulae).  An Astronomy magazine article in 2018 Richard described the RunCam camera and how to use it for video: “Capture Video with this Low Cost Camera”.  Richard received the 2017 Donald E. Osterbrock Book Prize, for the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers by the American Astronomical Society, Historical Astronomy and also authored “Bright and Dark Nebulae: A Guide to Understanding the Clouds of the Milky Way”, published by CreateSpace, 2017.