jforkner I can view and capture images of the Moon just fine
Is the focus of the Moon tack sharp?
If your stars are defocused, the photons from a star would be spread over many pixels, and would be too dim to register.
Next time you get focus on the Moon (far enough to be considered infinity), make a mark on the lens, and use that same focus position for stars.
Remember too that the Moon's magnitude is about -13. To get a star field that covers the FOV of a wide angle lens, the dim stars would need to be brighter than Magnitude +10 to have appreciable number of them. That is 23 stellar magnitudes. Each magnitude is a factor of 2.512 -- the 23 stellar magnitude is over a factor of 1500 million.
Even to see a 6th magnitude star (the limit of the human eye), there is a factor of 19 stellar magnitudes dimmer than the moon, or about a factor of about 40 million, or over 25 EV.
The Moon of course covers more pixels. If the size of the Moon is about 100 pixels or 10000 square pixels, then the factor of 40 million would be reduced to just 4 thousand.
With this size of the Moon, and the Moon was taken with a 1 millisecond exposure, a 6th magnitude star will need an exposure to be 4 seconds to appear as bright.
But there are not that many stars that are brighter than 6th magnitude. So you need much longer exposure times than 4 seconds (and that is assuming you are in perfect focus). Typically, to get a rich star field, you would need upwards of 100 second exposures.
Chen