Speaking to a capacity crowd in the beer garden of the Commercial Hotel, Dunedoo, Janits described what an inspiration he had been to all members of the Hawkesbury Society and how his innovative telescope and optical designs had set the astronomical world ablaze.
Meade and Celestron were competing, she said, for the rights to his Huygens-Erfle eyepieces with an amazing 180 degrees apparent field, research grade acrylic optics and finely turned mulga wood barrels which had become a talking point amongst amateurs world wide.
Richmond had become such a celebrity that the State government had erected road signs directing tourists to his home.
Over the past year, Richmond has introduced Hawkesbury members to such diverse wonders as the Telrad Barlow and the Newtonian main mirror cell with built in hot water bottle to both warm the mirror to prevent dewing, and to correct defects in figuring by being able to selectively vary the degree of inflation with hot water.
Also well attended have been his daylight meteor spotting sessions in the car park of Richmond McDonalds, with a cheeseburger personally autographed by the great man as a prize for each sighting.
Somewhat puzzling has been the fact that a far higher rate of sightings had been recorded AT THE SAME TIME by observers in the car park of the Pub just over the road. As the parallax displacement between the two sites is slight, Richmond is as yet at a loss to determine a plausible reason.