More D800 testing.
IMHO if one is spending the time to take a celestial time-lapse, it's worth the effort to shoot individual frames and post-process everything through something like Lightroom & LR Timelapse, rather than use the internal timelapse feature. Processing up to 8Gb of data per sequence was a lot less painful than I expected. (I just need to buy a 32Gb SD card to allow me to shoot an all night time-lapse!)
I took two 200 frame x 20sec exposure sequences, one at 3200ISO in RAW and the other at 6400ISO in medium quality JPEG. I used f4.5 for the first and f2.8 for the last, so the exposures aren't comparable - however, I did have to stretch the former a lot more (but that's easier to do if you've shot RAW).
The sky was extremely HAZY last Saturday, so I definitely hope for better results with more favourable conditions. In the second one, you can see the halos develop around the Southern Cross towards the end of the sequence. The light bubble on the left in the first one is Warwick (looking south from Leyburn)
ISO3200 f4.5 RAW
ISO6400 f2.8 JPEG
C&C welcome,
DT