Ursa Minor
UMi · genitive Ursae Minoris · northern sky
At a glance
- Catalogued stars
- 39
- Visible to the eye
- 39 stars
- Brightest star
- Polaris (1.97)
- Best seen
- May
- Declination span
- +71.8° to +89.3°
- Nearest star
- HD 136064 · 82.7 ly
Visible from everywhere north of about 1°S.
When and where to look for Ursa Minor
Ursa Minor crosses the meridian — its highest point in the sky — at local midnight around May, which makes the months from April to June the easiest time to find it in the evening. It spans declinations +71.8° to +89.3°, so visible from everywhere north of about 1°S.
The quickest way to find it is to open the live AR sky map and point your phone at the sky — if Ursa Minor is above your horizon right now, its figure is drawn in the position it genuinely occupies above you.
Brightest stars in Ursa Minor
| Star | Mag | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Polaris1Alp UMi | 1.97 | F7:Ib-IIv SB | 432.6 ly |
| Kochab7Bet UMi | 2.07 | K4IIIvar | 130.9 ly |
| Pherkad13Gam UMi | 3.00 | A3II-III | 486.8 ly |
| 22Eps UMi | 4.21 | G5IIIvar | 304 ly |
| 5 UMi | 4.25 | K4III | 358.8 ly |
| 16Zet UMi | 4.29 | A3Vn | 369 ly |
Magnitude runs backwards: lower numbers are brighter, and anything below about 6.5 is beyond the naked eye under a dark sky.
What Ursa Minor is made of
The catalogue lists 39 stars within Ursa Minor, of which 39 are magnitude 6.5 or brighter — the limit of what an unaided eye picks up under a genuinely dark sky. The rest need binoculars or a telescope.
Spectral make-up
Spectral class is a temperature ordering, running from O at around 30,000 K down to M below 3,500 K. A constellation is a direction, not a group, so this is simply what happens to lie along that line of sight.
The closest catalogued star in this direction is HD 136064 at 82.7 light years. The most distant is HD 117187 at roughly 1,173 light years — stars that appear side by side here are nothing of the sort.