Back when playing GC II ultimate, I was sure you could see 'nothing' on the map. The fog of war covered all. Ill fire it up and see. However, I agree with Brad the current system does look cluttered.
Being as we can see almost all the stars if we look with our land based telescopes here on earth, I would like to see a slight change.
Could we get a nice mulit-colored dot, not an empty circle but something that lets us know there is something there. I mean we can see from Earth so heading blindly like we did in GC II (to me) did not make much sense.
I know this game is NOT about realism, but even today we can now see planets around Stars. When GC II came out it was fantasy for us to see such objects. Personally I think we should capitalize on the fact we can put beautiful stars on the map and really should be one of the first things a player sees when he opens the map for the first time. It would go a long way to show casing what a beautiful engine the devs created and one more 'wow' point reviewers would give us.
I say have the beautiful background with nebulae and stars but when you move your ship near something it is 'revealed' upon proximity (asteroids, resources, habitable planets.)