Long exposure star trails with a $20 intervalometer trick

I kept getting gaps in my star trail shots and figured it was my cheap shutter release cable acting up. Turns out the real problem was that I was shooting in JPEG and the camera needed time to write each frame, so the gaps were actually dropped intervals. I switched to RAW and set the interval to 3 seconds longer than my exposure time, like 30 seconds on, 33 seconds off. That tiny buffer fixed everything on my third try last week from my backyard in Tucson. Now I can stack 200 frames in GIMP without any missing lines in the circles. Has anyone else run into this with a camera that has a slow buffer, or is there a better way to handle it without buying a fancier remote?

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dixon.felix23h ago

My buddy had the same issue with his old Canon, he fixed it by shooting raw with a stupidly long pause between shots.