You will need a sturdy tripod, a reasonably wide angle lens and a safe place to setup your system. Point your camera at the sky, with perhaps an interesting bit of foreground and take a few test shots until you are satisfied with the photos.
The interval timing functions are in the shooting menu, select "Interval timer shooting" and press "OK". It allows you to set a start time or right away by selecting "Now" (it doesn't really mean "now", it means after you finish setting everything and then after a 2 second delay. Select "Now" and press "OK". You select the interval in hours, minutes and seconds. For example, to set the interval to 1 minute, set the middle box to "1" and the others to "0". Press "OK" and you will se the screen to select number of times and number of shots. This can be confusing, for time-lapse you want to set the 3-digits to the total number of shots you want. For example, if you want to take a 2hour time-lapse of your backyard with one photo per minute, set the 3 digit box to "120". The "x" box is the number of shots to take at the beginning of each interval. For a basic time-lapse this should be "1". If you were doing something fancy like exposure bracketing, you would use "3". At this point, once you press "OK", the time-lapse will start either at the start time you set or after a 2 second delay.
The camera will keep track of the number of shots remaining in the LCD display.
I suggest you start with a 12 shot test (12 minutes) and then try longer movies.
When you are done, take your time-lapse photos, put them in Premier Elements, select them all and set the "time stretch" to 3 in the last box (3 frames).
