What's a word for "The gaps between the stars" or "The darkness between the stars"? It's OK if the word is obsolete or someone's name and not technically a word.

starspace
stargap
skygap
...

Interstellar void?

In one of the several Eucharistic prayers in the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer, the following language appears: "At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home."

I'm thinkin' that "the vast expanse of interstellar space" does, in a phrase, what you seek from a single word, eh?

Then there's always the celestial dome, the matrix in which it was thought the stars were set.

space?

stales

The void is a term I see frequently in SF novels.

... and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Alternatively, it's the Cosmic Microwave Background, which comes from all directions in space except where the brighter light from a star outpowers it.

I think Cap and TEd are on it: the interstellar void, or just The Void.

Or maybe just "The Expanse."

k

The final frontier.

Darkness ~ Byron

That is an Awefull poem, Jenet. I always felt that he must have read Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and decided he could do better!

How about, "the Fabric of Space?"

are there sumptuary laws about the fabric of space?

Only for the space over China and Russia

Where, of course, you are as likely to get a dressing down as you are to be dressing up!

Distance of Light (years)

What is a light-year?

http://science.howstuffworks.com/question94.htm

You are looking for a word for the inter-stellar spaces in Earth's night skies, or...?

What is a light-year?

One in which I only do 47 weeks-worth of work in between my five weeks holidays.

Just picking a nit here :
Didn't awful originally mean full of awe? Commanding profound respect. Reverential awe.
OED still lists it as a seond meaning (how the mighty do fall!)

According to AHD <http://www.bartleby.com/61/28/A0552800.html> it meant 'awe-inspiring' in ME and, cross-referencing to CASD<http://penguin.pearson.swarthmore.edu/~scrist1/scanned_books/png/oe_clarkhall/b0090.png>, the same in OE.

When using 'awefull' a few posts up, I was thinking along the 'shock and awe' line.

Please believe I didn't mean to offend. I just noted the spelling in a sort of visual double-take.
Should sit on my hands more. Sorry.

didn't mean to offend

S'okay! Never thought you did. But word play like that is always tricky and I often find that I have written something quite obscure that I blithely thought was transparent!

In fact a visual double-take was what I was trying for - some of the imagery in the poem is intended, rather like that in Dantés Inferno, to give feelings of fear and terror in an old fashioned way. The writing brings pictures to mind that would have to be produced as steel engravings; thinking about it, I believe the famous Doré illustrations to Danté are steel engravings - I'll have to check - and they convey the dark mood of the work.

Emptiness?

I think that gonoldothrond said it all.