You can get surprisingly good results with throwaway hardware. A few years ago I did an all-night time lapse of a night-blooming cereus opening up its once-year

You can get surprisingly good results with throwaway hardware. A few years ago I did an all-night time lapse of a night-blooming cereus opening up its once-yearly flower. $10 throwaway 480p webcam on a cheap tripod, old laptop running a script to capture every few minutes, old incandescent lamp to keep the thing lit through the night. Fed all the images into ffmpeg (with some noise reduction, I think?) and found the output looked almost professional, apart from the low resolution.