Thanks for the great advice.  I'll look at them all and see what works.

I like Mark's idea of mapping a star field to a large sphere and putting my scene inside that sphere, its low tech and might do the trick.   I just have to be carefull how the starfield is mapped on that sphere since the scaling could potentially stretch the starfiled bitmap.

Thanks.  I will post some (wip) pictures when I get some done.