For my Alert fighter project http://www.cerebral-bicycle.co.uk/viewdoc.asp?doc=319 I used a sphere of random points to render the star field, I project each point into 2D before adding it to a vertex array to ensure I only render the visable ones. I also use a perlin noise colored sphere to render a nebula effect over the top of the stars, i thnk the effect looks really nice. If I can hack out some of the code I'll post it for you if your interested.

or i could write a very quick article on it