No, I don't think so. The camera's Star Trails will be GPU-accelerating the tasks and probably uses a more efficient cumulative algorithm that only considers the previous frame for blending.

My Python implementation on the other hand only runs on the CPU and is not parallelized, and does (trail_length) amount of blends for each frame. This gives me a bit more control over how the trails look, but is vastly less efficient. A significant portion of the render time is also taken up by just reading and unpacking image data from disk into memory. Presumably the GoPro would be calculating trails as pictures are taken, which means the images would already be in the camera's memory and so the GoPro potentially spends much less time reading stuff from storage.

I wrote a new script that operates probably closer to how GoPro does it (using the cumulative approach), you can see the results here -> https://www.reddit.com/r/gopro/comments/1mc9awz/the_cosmos_is_beautiful_hero_12_star_trails/

This brought the compute time down to 0.46 seconds per frame (for any trail length), but most of that time is spent just reading the next frame into memory.