Shooting the Eclipse with a GoPro Hero5

At Back-Bone we’re always looking for creative ways to use our modified cameras. In this case we decided to use one of our C-Mount modified GoPro Hero5 Black cameras to shoot a timelapse of the 2017 eclipse from our location in Ontario, Canada.

We mounted our camera on a heavy duty tripod and fitted it with a Kendrick 6007-SF Solar Filter. The camera was fitted with a 25-135mm 1/2″ C-Mount lens with a 52mm variable ND filter. We also added a 0.9 OD neutral density filter inside the camera along with the IR-Cut filter. A USB power bank was used to keep everything running for the full duration. A Paralinx Arrow+ was also connected to beam the live video inside to one of our TV’s.

We recorded the entire eclipse at 1080/30. We could have done a timelapse with stills obviously, but we where hoping we might catch something interesting like a plane or birds flying in front of the sun, but unfortunately no luck ! Because our tripod wasn’t capable of tracking the sun, we had to manually adjust the position every 10 minutes or so to keep it in frame.

Next we spit out a subset of frames from Adobe Premiere and stabilized the sun’s position using After Effects. We adjusted the image and added a little color to make the shot more interesting. And there you have it!