Not sure if that is what you are looking for, but if you want to use a compact camera for night scenes (or low light), look for a way to set long exposure times on it.
Many but not all compacts have a way to define longer shutter times, either by offering a "manual mode" (where you can also set the desired aperture), by an "speed priority" mode ("S" on most cameras, "Tv" on Canons) or even by offering "scene modes" where you can choose "night scenery" or "fireworks" and thus obtain a similar result.
In this example I've used manual mode to set the exposure time for 15 seconds, which allowed me to capture a scene where there was quite little light:
Another use for longer exposures is to show continous movement as in the shot below, where the water flow exposed for 1/4 of a second (that would already be considered long exposure) makes it look like a veil over the rocks:
And finally, you could go in the opposite direction and use really short exposure times in order to capture moving things as if frozen in time. This example is a quite cliche shot of a water drop (on my kitchen sink) taken at 1/1300 of a second (note that when using such high speeds, you will need a lot more light in the scene, so in this case I've activated the camera flash):
