Before taking the time-lapse, it is important to think of the speed at which the event you want to picture occurs. For example, if you want to shoot a day-long time-lapse, it is not a clever idea to take a picture every five seconds: five minutes, or ten minutes, per picture, would make more sense. If you want to shoot people walking on a busy street, a picture every second or two will make the effect of people walking really fast.
Northern light time-lapses are something special: the main idea is not to speed up the process, but we are limited by the photography characteristics (explained in a previous post). Therefore, if we are shooting with one, two, or several seconds exposure, when you mount the video, the video will just be a speed-up of the reality. There is little to do against this:
One of the main differences between a time-lapse photo and a proper northern light photo, is that the quality of each single frame is not so important anymore. You are more interested in faster shooter speed, which will mean an increase in ISO. Apart of that, you will be taking a large amount of pictures, so think if you really need to shoot in RAW (and fill a lot of memory cards) or if you can handle it with JPEG. You will have thousands of pictures, so this is a crucial part.
Another important factor is the color balance, specially if you are going to shoot in JPEG: set it manually to a value (usually close to 3000K when shooting northern lights). You will be able to edit it afterwards, but if you let the camera decide the white balance, you may find yourself with slight changes during the sequence, that you will need to detect one by one (and we are talking about thousands of pictures).
When preparing the video after the shot, you will have to establish a number of frames per second. Really smooth videos require a minimum of 15-20 frames per second, but with northern lights, it is enough to use 8-9 frames per second. This is mainly due to the need of making the video as faithful to reality as possible.
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