> Mizar and Alcor

– stars of the double system of the constellation Ursa Major in the handle of the Big Dipper: description, characteristics, facts, distance, coordinates, how to find.

Mizar(Zeta Ursa Major) and Alcor(80 Ursa Major) create a double system in the constellation Ursa Major. The stars are in the handle of the Big Dipper asterism. These are main sequence blue dwarfs, between which there is a weak orbital connection and a distance of 1 light year. Mizar is a four-star system, while Alcor consists of 6 stars.

The star pair is 86 light years away from us and is sometimes called “Horse and Rider” (in ancient times, these objects were used to test vision). Below are the description, characteristics and coordinates of Mizar and Alcor of the constellation Ursa Major.

Fast facts about the stars Mizar and Alcor

• Constellation: Ursa Major.
• Coordinates: 13h 23m 55.5s (direct occurrence), +54° 55" 31" (declination).
• Distance: 86 light years.
• Star type(s): Mizar (A2V + A2V + A1V), Alcor (A5V).
• Massiveness: (Mizar Aa + Bb) 2.43 solar sol, (Alcor) 1.8 solar.
• Diameter: (Aa + Bb) 4.8 solar, (Alcor) 1.76 solar.
• Apparent magnitude: (Mizar) +2.27, (Alcor) +3.99.
• Luminosity: (Aa + Bb) 33.3 solar, (Alcor) 13.4 solar.
• Temperature heating: (Aa + Bb) 9000 K, (Alcor) 8000 K.

Visibility of the stars Mizar and Alcor

The Big Dipper asterism is considered circumpolar, so residents of the northern hemisphere can observe its stars all year round. Look for the star system in the center of the asterism handle, where the bend is.

Physical characteristics of the stars Mizar and Alcor

The stars Mizar and Alcor in the constellation Ursa Major are 1.1 light years apart. The star Mizar is represented by stellar objects Aa and Ab, separated by a distance of 0.29 AU. e., where the orbital period of rotation reaches 20.454 days, as well as stellar components Ba and Bb, distant at 3.12 AU. and rotating with a duration of 57 years. The Alcor star system consists of a blue dwarf A and a red dwarf B, separated by 0.5-1.5 light years.

Both stars are part of the Ursa Major Moving Group of stars, which share a common motion, but there is no confirmation of a gravitational connection between them.

History of the stars Mizar and Alcor

From Arabic, “mi"zar" translates as “apron, wrapper, cover or covering.” The Alcor star comes from the word “suha” and means “forgotten.” In some Japanese myths, Alcor is mentioned as the “star of life.” It was believed that people , unable to find this star in the night sky, will die by the end of the year.

:: Mizar and Alcor: the story of a sixfold star:: In the constellation Ursa Major, in the handle of the Big Dipper, there is the most famous double star in the sky - Mizar and Alcor. This pair occupies an important place not only in astronomical folklore, but also in the entire history of celestial science. On a dark, moonless night, far from city lights, several thousand stars are visible in the sky. Most of them are scattered across the sky completely randomly, but here and there we encounter strange star “heaps” like the Pleiades and Hyades, as well as absolutely amazing celestial patterns, such as the Big Dipper. Are they random??? And when we look at two stars located close to each other, does this mean that they are actually close, or they just happened to be on the same line of sight, but in fact are at different distances from the Earth??? Mizar and Alcor through a telescope

If you have a telescope, be sure to look through it at Mizar and Alcor: together with neighboring stars, they form one of the most beautiful objects in the sky! A small instrument will do for observation; you need to look at the minimum magnification. The color of the stars is diamond white, or, as Allen, a famous researcher of celestial names, said, “light emerald.” The angular distance between Mizar and Alcor is 708.55″ or 11.8′. In the same field of view as Mizar and Alcor, you will find several more stars that complement the picture, as if shading the bright pair. Particularly noteworthy is the 7th magnitude star located between them: this is the “Ludwig’s star,” so called by one German astronomer of the 18th century. It is not part of the Mizar and Alcor system, being a striking example of an optical satellite! Now take a closer look! The bright star Mizar in a telescope splits into two stars very close to each other! It turns out that in addition to Alcor, Mizar has another satellite, and the double star is actually a triple star! Mizar and Alcor are located about 80 light years from Earth. Photo: DSS2

The distance between the stars Mizar A and Mizar B is 14.4″; the main star has a magnitude of 2.27m, its companion is the same white star - 3.95m. The satellite's brightness is almost equal to that of Alcor (4.01m). It is often erroneously written that Mizar’s satellite was first seen by Riccioli in 1650, but in fact the duality of the star was discovered by Galileo’s friend and student, mathematician Benedetto Castelli, on January 7, 1617, which he mentioned in one of his letters to the great scientist. And on January 15, 1617, Mizar A and Mizar B were already observed by Galileo himself. And here Mizar and Alcor first appear on the stage of science as an important double star Mizar and Alcor - a sixfold system. The Alcor Star and its companion (circled). The picture was taken in the infrared range. The shine of bright Alcor is neutralized by a protective hood. Source: Neil Zimmerman et al., 2010

The end to this dispute seems to have been put in 2010, when a team of astronomers led by Eric Mamajec discovered... a satellite of the star Alcor! Alcor B turned out to be a typical red dwarf, which is located just 1 arcsecond from the main star. It is so dim that it drowns in the rays of Alcor. To detect it, we had to use the infrared camera of the 6.5-meter MMT telescope in Arizona, equipped with adaptive optics. An amazing discovery made it possible to increase the mass of Alcor by 0.3 solar masses (this is approximately how much Alcor B “weighs”), and this brought the total mass of the Mizar-Alcor system to 9 solar masses! Accurate measurements of the speeds and directions of movement of the two luminaries showed that Alcor and Mizar are most likely gravitationally connected to each other, which means that we are dealing with a sixfold star system! Such star systems are very rare. It is believed that within a radius of 130 light years from the Sun there are only two such stars - Castor in the constellation Gemini and Mizar with Alcor. What an amazing star is in the handle of the Big Dipper!

On a dark, moonless night, far from city lights, several thousand stars are visible in the sky. Most of them are scattered across the sky completely randomly, but here and there we encounter strange star “heaps” like the Pleiades and Hyades, as well as absolutely amazing celestial patterns, such as the Big Dipper. Are they random? And when we look at two stars located close to each other, does this mean that they are actually close, or they just happened to be on the same line of sight, but are actually at different distances from the Earth?

Although such questions have occupied curious people since time immemorial, reasoned answers to them have appeared only in the last 100-200 years.

For a long time, the nature of the most famous double stars in the sky, Mizar and Alcor, was also the subject of debate. You've probably seen this couple, because it is located in the constellation. Mizar- the second star in the handle, located on its bend. Alcor is Mizar's dim companion, which, when viewed with the naked eye, is very close to this star, at an angular distance slightly less than half the apparent size of the Moon.

Mizar and Alcor (circled) are a pair of stars on the bend of the handle of the Big Dipper. Photo: Rogelio Bernal Andreo/APOD

The dispute was as follows: which pair is this - optical or physical? If Mizar and Alcor are relatively close to each other, then they are inevitably connected to each other by forces of mutual attraction, just as the Sun is connected to the planets of the solar system. Such double stars are called physical. If they are located at a great distance from each other and just happen to be in the same area of ​​the sky, then we should call this pair optical.

Although this question may seem unworthy of special attention and even strange to a person not particularly interested in astronomy, it runs through the entire history of celestial science, popping up every time as if out of nowhere and in completely different contexts!

Mizar and Alcor in ancient times

There is no doubt that Mizar and Alcor have been known since ancient times. This is probably the first double star that our distant ancestors noted and highlighted in the sky.

At that time, the question of the nature of stars was raised seriously by few people. The generally accepted point of view was that the Earth is the center of the Universe, around which various celestial bodies such as the Moon, Sun, planets and, of course, stars revolve. An important difference between stars and other celestial bodies was that they did not change their relative position in the sky - the patterns of the constellations remained unchanged for centuries. They were called “fixed stars”. It was believed that the stars were attached to the celestial sphere and represented holes in the firmament through which divine light shone.

Knowledge about the sky at that time was of a purely practical nature: the Moon and the Sun served to count time and the calendar, and the stars perfectly helped to navigate in space and not to go astray for sailors, traders, or Bedouins in the desert.

Mizar and Alcor were used by different peoples to test visual acuity and sensitivity. There is a legend that in the Persian army this was one of the tests when selecting elite warriors, and the nomads of the Middle East checked the vision of young men using these stars. The Arabic proverb “sees Alcor, but does not notice the Moon” addressed a person who “notices only trifles, but does not understand serious things.”

Despite the fact that the “Arabic Eye Test” has been well known for centuries, in our time some astronomers question whether the Mizar-Alcor pair was taken as a test, since, in their opinion, it is not necessary to have very acute vision for in order to distinguish these two stars in the clear desert sky. Sir Patrick Moore even believed that instead of Alcor, another, dimmer star was taken next to Mizar. But ophthalmologists consider Alcor dim enough to correspond to the smallest letters in the well-known Snellen test.

It seems that the names of these stars go back centuries. In popular books on astronomy, Mizar and Alcor are often translated as Horse And Rider. However, this name appeared only with Johann Bayer in his famous celestial atlas Uranometria (1603) and not as a translation, but as the Latin names of these stars.

What do Mizar and Alcor mean? A thousand years ago, the Arabs called Mizar Mirak (or Merak), in exactly the same way as the stars epsilon and beta Ursa Major. In ancient times there was often confusion about which stars should be called by this name, and the Arabs came up with an alternative name for Mizar: Anak al Banat(Girls' necks). The star received the name “Mizar” approximately 400 years ago, when Scaliger suddenly began to call it that. Translated from Arabic, Mizar means Belt or Sash. Although this strange name was introduced without any reason, it stuck.

Mizar's companion, Alcor, probably takes its name from the same word as the brightest star in Ursa Major, Alioth. Some researchers believe that this is a corruption of the word "al-Jain" (index). The Arabs much more often called this star the word Suha, which translates as Insignificant, Weak.

Mizar and Alcor through a telescope

If you have a telescope, be sure to look through it at Mizar and Alcor: together with neighboring stars, they form one of the most beautiful objects in the sky! A small instrument will do for observation; You need to look at the minimum magnification.

Star color - diamond white, or, as Allen, the famous student of heavenly names, said, “light emerald.” The angular distance between Mizar and Alcor is 708.55″ or 11.8′. In the same field of view as Mizar and Alcor, you will find several more stars that complement the picture, as if shading the bright pair. Particularly noteworthy is the 7th magnitude star located between them: this is the “Ludwig’s star,” so called by one German astronomer of the 18th century. It is not part of the Mizar and Alcor system, being a striking example of an optical satellite!

Now take a closer look! The bright star Mizar in a telescope splits into two stars very close to each other! It turns out that in addition to Alcor, Mizar has another satellite, and the double star is actually a triple star!

An amateur sketch of the Mizar-Alcor pair, made through a 16-inch telescope with 260× magnification. Mizar (right) consists of two closely spaced white stars. Alcor is in the image on the left. Between the stars is a yellow star - Sidus Ludoviciana or Ludwig's star, so named by Professor Johann Liebknecht in honor of his master, Ludwig V, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. Although Ludwig's Star is yellow in this picture, it is in spectral class A and should therefore be bluish-white. Together with weaker stars, it is an optical satellite of Mizar and Alcor. Source: Iain P./CloudyNights.com

Distance between stars Mizar A And Mizar B is 14.4″; the main star has a magnitude of 2.27 m, its companion is the same white star - 3.95 m. The satellite's brightness is almost equal to that of Alcor (4.01 m).

It is often mistakenly written that Mizar’s satellite was first seen by Riccioli in 1650, but in fact the duality of the star was discovered by Galileo’s friend and student, a mathematician Benedetto Castelli, January 7, 1617, which he mentioned in one of his letters to the great scientist. And on January 15, 1617, Mizar A and Mizar B were already observed by Galileo himself.

And here Mizar and Alcor first appear on the scientific stage as an important double star.

Mizar and Alcor versus Galileo

As you know, Galileo Galilei is considered the first person to look at the sky through a telescope. It was in 1609, when a fierce struggle was going on in the scientific world between the structural systems of the Universe. The Ptolemaic world system, which was based on the two-thousand-year-old teaching of the great Aristotle, argued that the Earth was at the center of the Universe, and all other celestial bodies revolved around it, including the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. For that time, this theory was very logical, because the heavenly bodies really rotate around us, making a revolution per day! (With the Sun, Moon and planets the situation is more complicated, because they also move against the background of stars, but Ptolemy’s theory dealt with this too.)

In comparison with the Ptolemaic picture of the world, the Copernican system was revolutionary: it placed the Sun in the center, not the Earth, reducing the latter to just an ordinary planet. Today this seems obvious, but 400 years ago the Earth was not considered a planet!

Galileo was an ardent supporter of the Copernican system, and observations through a telescope only helped him confirm this. The very first discoveries made by Galileo using his very small instrument were stunning. It turned out that the Milky Way is a huge collection of very faint stars, the planets have disks like the Sun and Moon, and Venus and Mercury exhibit illumination phases similar to the Moon. Jupiter was surrounded by satellites, as if demonstrating the Solar System according to Copernicus in miniature... At that time, all this seemed so incredible that many scientists and enlightened people literally refused to believe in it. There is a known case when Galileo arranged public observations of the satellites of Jupiter, during which people, looking through the telescope, said that they did not see any satellites!

Nevertheless, it seemed that the telescope would immediately make a revolution, break the old view of the world and confirm the views of Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno...

Not so! Many of Galileo's contemporaries did not want to accept the Copernican theory, since, in their opinion, it was, in their opinion, less consistent with the observed facts than the Ptolemaic theory! Even discoveries made with the help of a telescope and indicating that the Polish scientist was right were not a sufficient argument. Opponents of Copernicus continued to defend the world according to Ptolemy (with various variations) - and, surprisingly, these scientists used to defend their views... also a telescope!

Today in popular literature it is customary not to mention that at that time the telescope worked for both sides of the conflict. Here are just two moments in this war of worldviews in which our couple, Mizar and Alcor, took part.

How far are the stars from us?

Galileo believed that the stars were distant suns, which meant that the size of the Universe was incredibly large. But Is it possible to find out the distances to the stars?

People have learned to determine the distance to distant objects using triangulation. Its essence is simple. Look at this text first with your left eye and then with your right. The text has shifted, hasn't it? This happens because we look at it from different points in space. Knowing the distance between the eyes (this distance is called base) and the angle by which the text is shifted, we can measure the distance to it without resorting to a ruler.

In the same way, you can find out the distance to any object, even a very distant one - you just need a wide enough base so that the angle by which the object shifts when observing it from its extreme points becomes noticeable.

Is it possible to measure the distance to stars in this way? If Ptolemy is right and the Earth is at rest, then no. More precisely, you can try to use different geographical points on the surface of our planet as a base, but observations carried out in this way showed that the stars are too far away for this base to be enough to measure the angles of their displacements.

But if Copernicus was right, an excellent basis for measuring stars appeared - Earth's orbit around the Sun! In six months, the Earth makes half a revolution around the Sun and ends up at the opposite point of its orbit. If you measure the position of a star with an interval of six months, then, according to Copernicus, you can notice its small displacement in the sky (astronomers call such a displacement parallax), and this will ultimately make it possible to measure the distance to the star!

Copernicus knew about this consequence of his theory and tried to use the parallaxes of stars as one of the main proofs that he was right. However, the parallaxes turned out to be too small to be detected with the naked eye. Neither Copernicus himself nor the great Tycho Brahe succeeded in doing this.

Maybe a telescope will help?

Galileo reasoned like this. If the stars are very distant suns and their brightness is approximately the same, then it is logical to assume that the dimmer the star, the farther from us it is. If you take two stars, one of which is bright and the other is dim, then you can assume that the parallax of the bright star will be greater than that of the dim one. This means that you need to take a pair of stars of different brightnesses located close to each other and measure the distance between them with an interval of six months. This is easier to do than measuring the displacements of each star separately. (Galileo borrowed these ideas from Ludovico Ramponi.)

The most natural pair of such stars were Mizar and Alcor. Benedetto Castelli, already mentioned by us, proposed using a third star, located between Mizar and Alcor, the same star of Louis. All three stars had different brightness: Mizar was the brightest, and the star of Louis was dimmer than both Mizar and Alcor. This means that all three stars would show different parallaxes. In addition, measuring the displacement angles did not seem to be a very difficult task due to the fact that the star of Louis formed an almost isosceles triangle with Mizar and Alcor, the changes in the sides of which would immediately catch the eye.

Galileo became interested in this idea; His drawing of a special hood for a telescope with a cutout for these three stars has been preserved. Such a lens hood would help measure the angle more accurately.

Castelli's drawing (left) showing Mizar (A), Alcor (B) and the Star of Louis (C). On the right is Galileo's sketch of a triangular lens hood for observing the Mizar parallax. Source: Siebert, JHA 2005

It was then that Castelli made his discovery: he discovered that Mizar itself consisted of two stars, the second being comparable in brightness to Alcor. They were located much closer to each other than Alcor to Mizar. We couldn't think of a better pair for parallax measurements!

Castelli, Galileo and some other scientists of that time tried more than once to detect the displacement of Mizar A relative to Mizar B. And each time without success. Galileo was annoyed to realize that the stars were much further from the Earth than he had originally thought. And his opponents triumphed - since no parallaxes are observed, it means that Copernicus’ theory is incorrect!

Today we know that the parallaxes of stars are extremely small and are far beyond the accuracy of observations of that time. In addition, both Galileo and other astronomers proceeded from the premise that Mizar's duality is optical. But this is not so: Mizar A and Mizar B are a physical couple; they are close to each other, which means they show the same parallaxes.

And here we return to the question of double stars. It turns out that 400 years ago, few people could have seriously thought that two closely located stars in the sky could be physically connected to each other. As you can see, by default it was believed that all double stars in the sky (several of them were known) were optical. Only after the discovery of many telescopic doubles, after Newton formulated the famous laws of mechanics, did the point of view begin to change.

Star sizes

The second point that interested astronomers of that time was the size of stars. If you can measure the disks of stars with the naked eye or using a telescope and compare them with the visible disk of the Sun, you can find out how far the stars are from the Earth than the Sun.

Indeed, astronomers have successfully “seen” the disks of stars and even measured them. The size of Sirius, as the brightest star in the sky, was the largest and, according to Tycho Brahe, was 0.61 the diameter of the Earth. Alcor took the standard of a faint star; The diameter of Alcor according to Brahe is only 0.15 of the diameter of our planet.

Later, Riccioli did the same thing, but with the help of a telescope. In the telescope, the “disks” of the stars, unlike the planets, did not increase in size, but were still noticeable. Using Alcor as an example, Riccioli showed that if we take the distances to the stars based on the Copernican theory, then their sizes became absurdly large - the size of the Earth’s orbit and even more! Then it seemed absolutely impossible. Riccioli successfully used this argument to attack Copernicus and his followers.

What past astronomers thought was the disk of a star was actually an Airy circle, a diffraction disk that marks the limit of a telescope's resolution. Source: photographylife.com

Of course, no “disks” of stars can be seen through a telescope. What astronomers observed was the scattering of bright light from the star on the retina of the eye: by removing excess light with a lens hood, the star could be seen almost as a dot. However, using enormous magnifications, astronomers still saw disks surrounded by rings. These are the so-called Airy disks, which are formed as a result of the diffraction of light and have nothing to do with the real disks of stars.

Mizar is the first in everything

Gradually, astronomers realized the enormous scale of the Universe. William Herschel, the famous 18th-century astronomer, discoverer of Uranus and pioneering nebula explorer, studied double stars for several decades. He discovered and described hundreds of double stars, and discovered orbital motion in some of them! By the beginning of the 19th century, there was no doubt that at least some of the double and multiple stars were physically connected.

Parallaxes of stars were discovered; Astronomers were able to determine the distance to the nearest ones. It turned out that even the closest stars are much further away than the astronomers of Galileo’s time imagined in their wildest fantasies.

Mizar and Alcor are located about 80 light years from Earth. Photo: DSS2

What about Mizar and Alcor? It turned out that they fly through space in approximately the same direction, as well as 4 other bright stars of the Ursa Major bucket. Obviously, the Big Dipper was the core of a nearby open star cluster, the members of which were scattered throughout the sky.

But whether the pair is a physical double or simply members of the same cluster was not clear. Astronomers determined the distance to Mizar and Alcor: it turned out to be approximately 80 light years. Knowing that the stars in the sky are separated by almost 12 arc minutes, astronomers have calculated that in fact the distance between the stars is tens of thousands of astronomical units! (1 AU is equal to the average distance from the Earth to the Sun, i.e. approximately 150 million kilometers.)

At such a vast distance, stars can only be gravitationally bound if they have a sufficiently large mass. Even 100 years ago, astronomers believed that the total mass of the stars in this system was not enough to keep them in orbit. However, over time, interesting details began to emerge.

We mentioned above that Mizar and Alcor were apparently the first double star identified in the sky. And Mizar was the first double star discovered through a telescope. But the list of Mizar’s “firsts” does not end there!

In 1857 Mizar became the first double star to be photographed. The daguerreotype was obtained at the Harvard Observatory by Bond Jr. (7 years earlier, Bond Sr. photographed Vega, the first star in the night sky, at the same observatory!)

In 1890 Mizar became the first spectroscopic binary star discovered. By studying the shift of absorption lines in the spectrum of Mizar A, astronomer Pickering came to the conclusion that it itself consists of two stars that orbit a common center of mass with a period of only 104 days!(Later this period was significantly refined and turned out to be equal to 20 days.) So Mizar became triple star, and the Mizar-Alcor system, if these two stars were physically connected, would be a quadruple star system!

The stars included in the Mizar A system are located so closely that they cannot be seen individually with any telescope. But it turned out to be possible to separate them using interferometry. In 1925, Mizar A became one of the first double stars to have the distance between its components measured interferometrically.

But even earlier, in 1908, it was discovered that Mizar B is also a double star! The discovery was made in a similar way - by the movement of lines in the spectrum of the star. This pair makes a full revolution in 175 Earth days.

What's the end result? Mizar appears before us as a system of four stars! The two pairs can be viewed separately - Mizar A and Mizar B are visible, as we have already seen, even in the simplest telescope, but dividing the pairs themselves into individual components is only possible using astrophysical techniques.

And again the question arose: if in the Mizar - Alcor system there are not two stars, but whole five, then perhaps the total mass of the components is sufficient to provide a gravitational connection between Mizar and Alcor?

Mizar and Alcor - sixfold system

The end to this dispute seems to have been put in 2010, when a team of astronomers led by Eric Mamazek ( Eric Mamajec) discovered... a satellite of the star Alcor! Alcor B turned out to be a typical red dwarf, which is located only 1 arcsecond from the main star. It is so dim that it drowns in the rays of Alcor. To detect it we had to use the infrared camera of a 6.5-meter telescope MMT in Arizona, equipped with adaptive optics.

The Alcor star and its companion (circled). The picture was taken in the infrared range. The shine of bright Alcor is neutralized by a protective hood.

The constellation Ursa Major is considered perhaps the most famous. It is easy to find in the night sky, especially in the month of August. Usually remembered in the form of a bucket, if you draw lines connecting the dots (stars). The constellation has 7 bright stars. This is not only a beautiful sight, but they look for the polar star along the Ursa Major. It is enough to take the distance of the two extreme stars and set aside 5 segments, continuing the vector.

But this is not the only way to look for the North Star. If you draw a segment from the star Mizar (constellation Ursa Major) to the star Gamma (constellation Cassiopeia), then in the middle of the segment there will be the North Star.

Ursa Major in the night sky

Stars Mizar and Alcor

The constellation Ursa Major is rich in legends and history about the stars Mizar and Alcor.

Mizar and Alcor are stars that are part of the constellation Ursa Major.
Although the distance between Mizar and Alcor is more than a quarter of a light year, they are part of a binary star system.

It has long been believed that people with acute vision next to the star Mizar see another star - Alcor. This has become a traditional way to test your vision. So, before being taken onto the ship, sailors were tested for their ability to see Alcor.

There are legends about the Mizar-Alcor pair of stars. In ancient Egypt, the pharaoh's troops recruited soldiers and archers who could clearly see two stars.

The legend about Ali, the assistant and friend of the Prophet Muhammad, says that after death, Ali goes to heaven and Allah gives him a horse. So from the Arabs came the legends about a horse and a rider - Mizar and Alcor. The horse is much larger than the rider (Mizar) and is noticeable to many, and the rider (Alcor) is very small.

As a conclusion, we can say that Alcor is really a small star. However, there are claims that even people with slight visual impairments can see it. Be that as it may, you can see these two stars in the handle of a large bucket (Ursa Major) and once again be convinced of the “functionality” of your vision.

Look at the clear night sky and look for Alcor on the Big Dipper, and with , you will already have a clear subject.

From the Arabic mizar - "the middle [of the Bear's tail]" and al-marakk - "the groin [of the Bear]."
Fixed star, 79 Zeta Ursa Major. Apparent magnitude 2.07 m. Mizar is physically a triple star; the main components 2.27 m class A1 Vp and 3.95 m class A1 m white are located from each other at an angular distance of 14.4 "and revolve around a common center of mass with a period of about 20,000 years. Using spectral analysis, it was possible to establish that Mizar A, in turn consists of two almost touching stars, rotating with a period of 20.5 days. In addition, Mizar, together with the star g Ursa Major (Alcor), forms an optically multiple system; Alcor 3.95 m is located at an angular distance of 708" from Mizar. The distance from Mizar to the Sun is 27 pc. Astronomical position of the first component for 2000: AR=13 h 23 m 55.5 s; D=+54°55"31"; position of the second component: AR=13 h 23 m 56.4 s; D=+54°55"18". Ecliptic coordinates of the center of the M. system: Long=165°42"00"; Lat=+56°22"44". In the drawing of the constellation Mizar is located in the middle of the tail of the Bear (i.e. in the middle of the handle of the ladle).
The Mizar multiplicity was discovered by the astronomer Riccioli, a contemporary of Galileo.
According to tradition coming from Ptolemy, Mizar has the influence of Mars. Kefer considers this influence favorable. But according to Ebertin and Hofmann, this star in conjunction with evil planets does not bode well. However, these researchers recognize that subtle artistic emanations can also emanate from Mizar (especially when combined with ASC).
According to Saplin, Arab authors find in Mizar the character of Venus and Mercury.
Rigor points out that in natal astrology this star acts mainly beneficially: Mizar endows the native with ambition, creativity, artistic inclinations, but often also brings disharmony into the life of the native. In mundane astrology, this star influences the masses; it is associated with disasters, controversial issues, and tragedies.
In the Avestan tradition, the servants of Mizar are Mercury, Venus and Neptune. According to P. Globe, Mizar gives a person the ability to see harmony, a sharp mind, penetration and excellent intuition. Such a person has a lot of friends and supporters. Mizar gives the ability to win over oneself, charm, psychological gift, and the ability to recognize dangers. On, and also in conjunction with the Moon, Mizar brings the ability to search for treasures.
In the theory of systemic interpretation of stars by D. Kutalev, Mizar as zeta of Ursa Major correlates with the element of the Earth at the second level of manifestation, and as an A1 class star it is associated with the Moon and the additional influence of Saturn. According to this theory, Mizar means a good sense of matter, hard work, desire for comfort and stability. However, the fact that Mizar is a multiple star speaks of the opposing aspirations tearing a person apart and the fact that the desired stability is usually not achieved. The problem is that, on the one hand, Mizar requires the native to distance himself from material life and devote himself to serving higher powers, and on the other hand, he tempts him with all the benefits of this material life.