The Joseph Weber Award for Astronomical Instrumentation is awarded by the American Astronomical Society

American Astronomical Society

The American Astronomical Society is an American society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC...

 to an individual for the design, invention or significant improvement of instrumentation leading to advances in astronomy

Astronomy

Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...

. It is named after physicist Joseph Weber

Joseph Weber

Joseph Weber was an American physicist. He gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser and developed the first gravitational wave detectors .-Early education:...

. The awards tend to be for a career of instrument development rather than a single specific device; the lists of inventions below are taken from press releases from the recipients' institutions.

Weber Award winners are:

Year	Recipient	Inventions
2002	James E. Gunn James E. Gunn James Edward Gunn is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy at Princeton University. Gunn's early theoretical work in astronomy has helped establish the current understanding of how galaxies form, and the properties of the space between galaxies...	CCDs in astronomy: WFPC Wide Field and Planetary Camera The Wide Field/Planetary Camera was a camera installed on the Hubble Space Telescope until December 1993. It was one of the instruments on Hubble at launch, but its functionality was severely impaired by the defects of the main mirror optics which afflicted the telescope...  on Hubble Hubble Space Telescope The Hubble Space Telescope is a space telescope that was carried into orbit by a Space Shuttle in 1990 and remains in operation. A 2.4 meter aperture telescope in low Earth orbit, Hubble's four main instruments observe in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared... , Sloan Digital Sky Survey Sloan Digital Sky Survey The Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS is a major multi-filter imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey using a dedicated 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, United States. The project was named after the Alfred P... , ...
2003	Frank J. Low Frank J. Low Frank James Low was a solid state physicist who became a leader in the new field of infrared astronomy, after inventing the gallium doped germanium bolometer in 1961...	IR detection by bolometer Bolometer A bolometer is a device for measuring the power of incident electromagnetic radiation via the heating of a material with a temperature-dependent electrical resistance. It was invented in 1878 by the American astronomer Samuel Pierpont Langley...  arrays
2004	Thomas G. Phillips	Sub-millimetre and terahertz instrumentation
2005	Stephen Shectman	Active optics
2006	J. Roger Angel	Adaptive optics Adaptive optics Adaptive optics is a technology used to improve the performance of optical systems by reducing the effect of wavefront distortions. It is used in astronomical telescopes and laser communication systems to remove the effects of atmospheric distortion, and in retinal imaging systems to reduce the...  for infra-red spectroscopy Spectroscopy Spectroscopy is the study of the interaction between matter and radiated energy. Historically, spectroscopy originated through the study of visible light dispersed according to its wavelength, e.g., by a prism. Later the concept was expanded greatly to comprise any interaction with radiative...
2007	Harvey Moseley	Microshutter arrays, X-ray microcalorimeter
2008	James R. Houck	Spectrographs for infrared astronomy