I love photographing the stars, but my favorite lazy photographer astrophotography hack is to start a time-lapse – and then go to sleep. The GoPro Mission 1 Pro seemed ripe for such a shot.
GoPro says that the battery life is the best yet, and the larger sensor improves low-light performance, so I abandoned the newest GoPro on a beach overnight.
The Mission 1 Pro isn’t the first GoPro that I’ve used to photograph the night sky. I’ve previously set up my GoPro Hero 12 Black on a time-lapse during northern lights activity so I could move around and snap a variety of different compositions with my mirrorless camera.
I was surprised at how well the action camera then managed to capture the night sky – but in the past I’ve always used the GoPro Volta battery tripod in order to record a complete time-lapse from darkness to sunset.
Curious to see just how much the camera’s new 1-inch sensor and larger battery make a difference, I set the new Mission 1 Pro on a tripod just after midnight and started recording.
I set the camera to create a 4K timelapse, as I wanted more detail than FullHD but didn’t want a lot of noise with the starlight conditions. That meant the still images were around 8MP.
I set the camera up to use a slower 20-second shutter speed, to let in the most light and blur the lake. I programmed the camera to take a photo every minute, shooting both an assembled video and JPEG images, and then went to sleep.
Under these settings – and a hot summer evening – the Mission 1 Pro managed to record from about 00:20 to 05:30. That was long enough that I had to cut the last second off my video, as the battery lasted long enough to run just past sunrise and overexpose the last few frames.
That’s an impressive length of time for such a small camera to keep shooting without plugging into an external battery pack.
The still photos that the GoPro stitched into a video are equally impressive, coming from such a small camera and as 8MP shots. The stars aren’t quite tack-sharp, and I did pull up the shadows a bit to see more detail from the lake shore, but, I thought the shots were very good coming from an action cam rather than a mirrorless camera.
Yes, I could get more resolution by using 8K or shooting 50MP RAW photos – but I wanted to balance low-light quality and battery life. Considering the GoPro still recorded past sunrise, now I’m eager to try an 8K timelapse next.
The GoPro Mission 1 Pro feels like a natural evolution for the popular action camera maker. The camera still looks, feels and operates like a GoPro, but that boosted sensor and battery are a welcome change.
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I also tried out the GoPro Mission 1 Pro as a point-and-shoot camera. Read more about the best action cameras.
