You don't say what camera you are using. It can make a big difference. 50mm isn't ideal for night sky photography, but with some effort, you could make it work by shooting and assembling a panorama. But to get your individual images, I would suggest the following approach:

Before dark, find infinity focus, then turn off AF and tape your focus ring in place to keep it from shifting. Correct focus is a requirement, and you are not going to achieve it with AF. You also cannot depend on the infinity indicator on your lens to tell you where to focus.

For your lens, you are going to need to use f/2 as your shooting aperture. You will be using Manual Exposure for all settings.

The Rule of 500 says that for a 50mm lens, 10 seconds is the maximum exposure without obvious star trails. For that to work at f/2, you are going to need an ISO setting of at least 4,000. This will probably not be enough exposure, and you will probably need to stretch your expisure to 20 seconds. This will likely result in some trailing, but is likely the best you can do with that lens.

Please note that location is a problem for you. Most spots in the eastern US offer high humidities and low elevation. The low elevation means more atmosphere to shoot through, causing loss of exposure and clarity.

Finally, you are going to need to be capturing raw files, and you are going to need to do post orocessing to bring your images out og the shadows. If your camera is an older model, it may not have enough dynamic range at the necessary ISO to allow you to capture anything but the brightest stars.

Try again with this setup and see if you capture more of what's there.

Last week I camped in Shenandoah national park , and tried for first time photographing the stars.
With my 50mm fixed lens, f2.2 and ISO 100, 20 secs shutter speed, i got stars in circular shapes the bright ones and very dim ones too.

I am aware that Earth's rotation plays an important role.

Here are my questions::

1. Did you guys got in the same way for similar metadata??

2. On the top left corner, I noticed something in light orange. Any idea what it could be? My guess is that it might be Andromeda galaxy.

Second attachment is the photo, first is a screenshot.

Thanks
Sastry Karra