Hi Sandy,
Just to add a few points to what Jack said...
If you are referring to Jack's setup (which he posted pictures of above), it's a bit of a novel setup in that he is using one camera to take individual long exposures, and another to simultaneously record footage. Normally most people would do one or the other, but Jack had the good idea of doing both since it helps with locating events (meteors) within the footage, which is time consuming to go through in the search for events of interest. Doing it this way, it's faster to check the images, and use that to work out roughly where/when to find the event in the footage, but there's no need to do it this way.
With regards to telescopes vs camera lenses, for meteors (and other types of wide field astrophotography eg. Auroras) camera lens are preferred over telescopes, which tend to have quite narrow fields of view. For meteors, a wider field of view covers more atmosphere, so there is a higher chance of catching them. For many applications telescopes and lenses are interchangeable, and can give similar results, although this is not always the case, so you need to do your homework when choosing. Each has advantages and disadvantages.
If you are asking how best to capture a background of many stars, then there are many factors which will determine how starry your background is. Probably the most important is having a good (not too light polluted) clear sky. If you have access to dark rural skies you'll get better results, and have less work to do to correct images/remove light pollution, although you can still get good results from suburban/light polluted sites if you know what you are doing as Jack has shown.
Camera and lens become more important if you are under less light polluted skies, and/or want to image faint meteors. If you want many stars in an image then either dark skies + fast lens or dark skies + tracker is probably the best way to go.
For imaging meteors we tend to forego the very starry backgrounds, and concentrate on catching meteors instead, but both are possible from darker skies. In my own case, I started recording footage partly because it's more forgiving with more light the polluted skies we moved to a few years back. Before that (living in a low Bortle 4 area, ie fairly dark) I would mainly shoot long exposures. Long exposures here suffer badly from light pollution, especially low down in the sky. With footage I'm using 1/30 s exposure time, which does not give light pollution the time to build up in a long exposure, while at the same time being able to use a very sensitive camera+lens combination.
Here (and also Part #2) for example is footage from our old house (taken last year during the Perseid meteor shower) where I was able to use very high ISO once it was fully dark (revealing more stars). Compare that with this footage of a fireball from here under relatively good conditions (aside from the light pollution). Both examples are using same camera+lens.
