I have noticed some nights when walking my dog, that there are no
stars in the sky at all. Does the Earths orbit sometimes take it through
featureless regions of space?
This is what astronomers call ‘a cloud’.
Lack of visible stars in the night sky is caused by cloud cover or light pollution, not a star-less region of space.
I will defer a factual answer to someone who actually has a knowledge of the subject, but there are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand in all the Earth surface. That does not mean you can always see them. Clouds, atmospheric conditions, convection, etc may affect your view of the night sky. In Iraq, we were station in a “light disciplined” area. Most nights I could see billions of stars. Some nights few, most of those nights were as a result of ambient light or cloud cover.
Sgt Schwartz
Nope. The earth orbits the sun at a distance of 93 million miles. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri is 24,600,000,000,000 miles away. If it’s dark, and the sky is clear, and the earth is facing the right direction, you can always see it. The same goes for the 6,000 or so other stars visible to the naked eye.
Clouds, moon glow, or the glow of streetlights can easily cover up starlight, but the same stars are always there, above the atmosphere.
Louis Cyphere huh? Good username: Is it after the character from Serpent in the Rainbow? Louis Cypher = Lucifer
I thought that was from Angel Heart.
There are star-less regions in the sky (interstellar dark dust clouds) but we aren’t close enough to one for it to blot out a 1/3rd of the sky or somesuch.
“Big sky too big to cry
Big sky too high to see
People like you and me”
Not such that it would vary night to night.
There have been simulations done that show that the Sun (with the Earth in orbit around it) might be thrown to the far outer reaches of the combined galaxy that will form when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide in two billion years or so. If that happens and there is anyone on Earth then to observe the stars, they will see a lot fewer stars in their night sky than we do now.
There is also some seasonal variation in the number of bright stars you can see. In the evening in the summer (in the Northern Hemisphere), the part of the night sky you see includes the constellation Sagittarius, which is where the galactic center is located. In the evening in the winter, you’re also looking into the plane of the galaxy (but away from the center). You see more bright stars at night in the summer or winter than you do in the spring or fall, when you’re looking perpendicular to the galactic plane. But you still do see stars overhead in the evening in the spring and fall- just not as many as you do at other times of year.
Actually you can only see a few thousand stars with the naked eye, as Squink says.
There are times when the Earth passes by a black hole. When that happens there are no stars to be seen. Be cautious, the black hole has a weird effect on gravity and if you stand up too straight you can get sucked in to it.
Right. You need to go out and buy a telescope like, say, one of these if you want to see beellyuns of stars.
Got it in one, J.D. You cannot beat a bit of Bobby De! 
Behave, you! 
In an attempt at a serious answer; atmospheric dust is the culprit - tiny particles of matter and moisture that absorb and reflect light, causing the daytime atmosphere to have a glow (typically blue) that obscures the light of the stars. In contrast, shuttle and lunar astronauts could see the stars all the time, even when the Sun was visible. The reason stars don’t appear in some Apollo photographs is because to pick them up, you’d need a long exposure time (as is the case for taking stellar photographs on Earth).
It takes a particularly bright light source to penetrate the daytime diffusion; the moon, naturally, but Venus and sometimes a few bright stars can manage it at dawn and dusk.
This star is not visible in the Northern hemisphere. It isn’t even a bright star.
That’s why the earth must be “facing the right direction.”
The 186,000,000 mile circle that the earth moves in during its orbit around the sun, and the 4,300,000,000 miles that the solar system travels each year through the milky way, are tiny when compared to the distance (24,600,000,000,000 miles) to even the nearest star. That implies that the view doesn’t change much.
Even the star with the largest proper motion only shifts by 10.3 seconds of arc per year. That’s 0.00286 degrees, or 6/1000th of the diameter of the full moon. You’ll not notice that small a change in the sky while walking the dog.
You can’t see it without a telescope from anywhere on Earth- it’s too dim.
You can’t see that star (Barnard’s star) without a telescope, either, for the same reason- it’s too dim.
One star with a relatively large proper motion that you can see without a telescope is Arcturus. Edmund Halley measured its proper motion by noticing that its position differed by about half a degree from what Ptolemy and other ancient astronomers said it was. Half a degree is about the width of the full moon, Ptolemy was mapping the sky around 150 AD, and Edmund Halley was doing his work around 1700.
Not only will you not see that change while walking the dog, you probably won’t notice any change in the positions of the stars over your lifetime.