On Monday, August 21st 2017, people across the United States will be witness to a total eclipse...of the heart. Just kidding. It's a real eclipse. (But, in fairness, Bonnie Tyler is actually scheduled to sing her classic world-wide hit on a Caribbean cruise ship during the actual phenomenon). During this Great American Eclipse, as it is so creatively referred, Americans will actually see the moon completely block the sun, turning daylight into twilight, with the sun's corona shining around the dark of the moon. In short, its gonna be awesome.

So the real question here is, how the heck do I capture this monumentous occasion? Don't fear; GoPro Engineering Tools Specialist Shreenivasan Manievannan and Technical Fellow David Newman have some tips for you.

Some basics. The whole transit from start to finish, somewhat depending on your location, is about three hours. And as three hours likely produces pretty boring video, Time Lapse is the way to go. If you intend to time-lapse the entire transit, you can use any USB power brick to extend the GoPro's run time; otherwise, make sure you have a full charge on your GoPro battery, and plan to start your Time Lapse about one hour before totality.



Timing. We recommend a 5s time-lapse interval for two-hour capture, which will be a 48-second video when played at 30p. A shorter video to share would be better, yet if you are lucky to have two minutes of totality, this interval only gets you 24 frames (0.8s) of time in the totality. If you intend to work on the video with a speed ramp for the less exciting bits, then a 1- or 2- second interval might be better, but watch out for your battery life.



Framing. As you know the GoPro lens is very wide, so your composition will not be of any close-up views (well, without mounting the GoPro against an eyepiece of a telescope, which David will be doing in one setup). With a wide time-lapse, consider how the light will change across the landscape, so compose your framing to capture that.



Time Lapse video vs. Time Lapse photo vs. Night Lapse photo. Time-lapse video (TLV) is the easiest by far, producing a small MP4 that is ready to share, as soon as the cell service recovers from the network load of millions of eclipse chasers filling small country towns. The downside of TLV is there are no Protune controls, it is all automatic. The other two time-lapse modes will produce JPGs (and GPRs if RAW is enabled) and you can have Protune level controls to set the look (GoPro vs Flat), white balance, ISO, sharpness etc. If you are in the path of totality, choose Night Lapse, it will still work during daylight, but will take much longer exposures as needed for the dark few minutes. Below are some baseline settings for Time and Night Lapse, with Protune.



