Polaris
Star
The star the whole northern sky appears to turn around, which is why travellers have used it to find north for centuries.
Can you see it tonight?
Where are you?
To work out whether you can see this tonight, we need to know roughly where you are looking from. Your position stays in your browser: it is never sent to us, never stored and never shared.
Without it, everything else on this page still holds: what this object is, where it sits on the sky, and where every fact came from.
What it looks like
A photograph of this patch of sky, taken by a telescope on the ground. Polaris is at the centre.
Brightness adjusted so faint detail shows. Every picture here is a rendering of the survey's measurements rather than a measurement itself, and this is the same setting for all of them.
- Position
- 37.95290, 89.26420Source: Yale Bright Star Catalogue
- Distance
- Too far for this catalogue to measure
- Brightness
- about 2.02Source: Yale Bright Star Catalogue
- Spectral class
- F7:Ib-II
- Surface temperature
- about 6,500 KWorked out by us from the spectral class
- Constellation
- Ursa MinorSource: Yale Bright Star Catalogue
Catalogue designations
HR424
Source: Yale Bright Star Catalogue HR number