Sometimes you need to find creative ways to do what you need in a practical manner. If your time lapse video is to be shown on the net, or on SD format, why not buy a nice and cheap 4 camera surveillance kit on ebay? It has 4 cameras that you can put on cheap light stands and leave them on for 6 months. You can slap the included PCI capture card on a cheap pc with a several terabytes of space and capture continuosly without a hitch.

Some of these systems can capture decent video @ 720 X 480, in color and in low light environements.

On ebay, a system like this is around $260 US. 4 cheap light stands are like $80 bucks @ $20 each. a Nice cheap computer run around $200 (I´ve just bought a gateway quad core on woot.com for $189, 650gb HD 4gb ram)

Of course they are not broadcast quality, and you may need to convert the video for further use, but the job can be done without selling a kidney.

Then, for higher resolution images, you can wander now and then with your Nikon to snap a few shots of the restoration process.

Just my two cents.

Alex