>The problem is, there are MILLIONS of stars to render.

Billions (or trillions depending on your galaxy).  It would be impossible,
needless to say hideously slow to attempt to render all the individual
stars in a galaxy, in one view.  A comparison would be modeling a small
desktop object... using atoms.

What you'll want to do instead is have levels of detail.  The renders you
presented would be your lowest level of detail.  As you get closer to the
galaxy you'd zoom in one more level and use another, more intricate media
density.  Your third level of detail could be a transparent texture with a
noise function on it.  The noise would create dots that would wind up to be
your stars.  Your final level of detail would use the coordinates of the
dots as actual objects, spheres or glows.  The other LODs would still be
visible in the background (except maybe the highest two).

Coding your proximity to galactic center and computing a resulting star
density, and translating the noise into 3D objects, will definitely be a
fun project!

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