Mostly just noise. There are some stars, but their signals are so weak they are barely higher than 1:1 SNR (due to both light pollution, as well as camera noise which comes from read noise and dark current). A lot of what might look like stars is also likely just hot pixels due to dark current, which can be ludicrously high on DSLRs (even these days, sadly, although it's getting better in general.)
When it comes to astrophotography, you are severely limited in terms of signal. To effectively image the night sky, especially in the city, you need to combine lots and lots of exposure (usually many individual sub exposures, aligned and stacked) to get anything usable. The dynamic range of objects in space tends to be massive. While you might have 9, 10, maybe even 11 stops of DR with a DSLR at higher ISO, you will often need 14, 16, or more stops of dynamic range to really bring out all the faint details (say the milky way).
Light pollution is obviously a problem. In your image, you also have the moon, which adds even more LP. It's best to image the night sky when it is as dark as possible. That means no moon, and later at night (when there are fewer cars on the road, fewer home and office lights on, etc.) The darker the skies, the easier it will be to get usable data in each exposure.
If you wish to image anything other than the moon, planets, or perhaps stars (such as the milky way or star clusters), then you will need to look into getting some kind of tracking mount. A basic tracker like the Star Adventurer, SkyTracker or Polari will usually do for basic DSLR+Lens imaging, and can allow you to get significantly more data without star trails or smudging from the motion of the stars across the sky.
The bigger the lens aperture the better as well (and I mean physical aperture here, entrance pupil, not relative aperture...which is such a horrible concept when it comes to astrophotography! ;P In this context, aperture refers to the literal, physical size of the opening in the lens...not F/#!! We always use f-ratio to refer to f/# in an astrophotography context.) So the fastest and best-corrected lens you can find will be best. In the case of ultra wides, wides, normals and moderate telephotos, the Samyang/Rokinon/Bower lenses actually tend to be the best performers (with a few rare exceptions). They are well corrected corner to corner, with minimal aberrations, and tend to be pretty fast with big apertures. A big aperture with a fast f-ratio will suck down more light in a given exposure time, which will help you reveal fainter details more quickly (it will give you a better SNR for any given exposure time.)
Once you are gathering enough light per exposure that some amount of the details you are after gets above the noise floor, you'll have an easier time creating interesting images of space, at whatever field of view. If you are in the city...and are most interested in ultra wide fields (i.e. milky way imaging)...get out of the city. Drive out about 30 minutes from the edge of town, and you'll be amazed at what even a basic camera and lens can get even on a fixed tripod. ;)
