This time I stopped the dark frame subtraction and switched off raw shooting, and the interval was a very solid 15s.
From the log, the minimum value "sleep" is 220 ms, so you've got pretty close to the minimum interval with your chosen settings. It's pretty stable so you could probably use ~100 ms shorter interval or longer exposure without exceeding the interval, but neither will make a big difference.
In my real life shoot neither the sun nor the moon will be making an appearance so please keep that in mind when reviewing the rawopint data.
That should certainly make things easier.
Looking at the most recent run, most of the night is on the exposure limits (max ISO, longest shutter) so in this segment the effect of the under exposure and low meter limits is to make the script more resistant to moving exposure in the other direction. In other words, making the under exposure limits stricter wouldn't brighten the scene. Relaxing them or making the over exposure limits stricter would potentially allow the scene to get darker in response to areas of overexposure.
If you want to get more exposure at night, you might get away with upping the ISO a bit. Assuming your target is 1080P youtube playback or similar, downscaling from 16 MP reduces the noise you see quite a bit compared to a full res still. If you do, you should test in advance, because the Canon firmware introduces various levels of noise reduction (other than dark frame) at various ISO levels, which add to processing time. So you might find that setting ISO 360 breaks your interval, while ISO 359 does not (numbers made up).
c_joerg may disagree, but I think these settings are a reasonable compromise. The moon would look better with less over exposure, but not at the expense of making the foreground totally dark. Letting the scene get a little darker might be better compromise, but it's a subjective call, and if you want to see the landscape, the moon itself is going to be blown out.
Similarly, the bright lit windows in the nearby building are over exposed, but the rest of the scene getting darker when they go on would likely be distracting.
Fortunately, it sounds like neither of these should be issues in the real shoot.
For me, the worst over exposure in this run is probably right around sunrise (starting around 2:30, corresponding to the over exposure peak of ~2.78% around frame 3918). Again may not be an issue for your real shoot if the sun won't be rising directly in view, but it's a case where controlling overexposure more would probably look better. Further relaxing the under exposure limits (increasing under_thresh_frac or turning it off) would probably help there.
The flip side of this is, once the sun actually comes into view, it's going to over expose no matter what, so you still have to decide how dark you want to allow the rest to get. But again, allowing it to get a little darker would probably be fine. However, in this case, when the sun is in view, you hit the short shutter limit of 1/10000, so making the limits stricter wouldn't make the scene darker anyway. You could allow even shorter shutter speeds, but 1/10000 is already pretty extreme, and pushing the limits may result in flickering (though it seems fine here)
Note the meter limits are not active (meter weight == 100) in the sunrise section. Roughly half the scene is bright and half is dark, so the
average exposure is great
. In a case like this, you could bias the meter to favor the sky or ground by adjusting the height and position. E.g. if you want to focus on sky colors, metering only the top half of the scene, or if you want the landscape, only the bottom. Or 2/3 if you want favor one but still have some influence from the other. Not suggesting this applies for your current project.
Overall, my suggestions if you want to tune further form this run would be:
1) Explore increasing ISO, probably to something under 400, before the extra noise reduction kicks in
2) Increase under_thresh_frac to maybe 40%, or turn it off entirely (0) as c_joerg suggested.
