Just have a bunch of little objects, or a gif background(dome) ?
How many stars, and doing what? I'd use GL_POINTS or perhaps sprites if there weren't too many.
Cas :)
A skybox looks pretty bad... try using a skysphere... that should look ok-ish.
enough stars that move enough to show your ship is moving/turning and maybe some colored gas clouds way off that you can never reach. Then as you make hyperspace jumps to new sectors the backgrounds are slightly different than before.