Polaris, the North Star

Polaris is the North Star: the star nearest the point that the northern sky turns around. Because it barely moves, it shows the direction of north at night to anyone in the Northern Hemisphere. It is not, despite its fame, a particularly bright star.

Where is it from where I am?

How to spot it: The two end stars of the Big Dipper's bowl point to it. Source (opens in a new tab)

Why it stays put

As Earth spins, every star seems to wheel around two points in the sky above the poles. Polaris sits close to the northern one, so as NASA puts it (opens in a new tab), it stays in essentially the same spot and marks north. By this site's calculation from the Bright Star Catalogue it is 0.63° from the pole in 2026, a little more than the width of the full Moon, and still closing: 0.55° by 2050.

Its height above your northern horizon is almost exactly your latitude. At the North Pole it is overhead; at the equator it sits on the horizon; a little south of the equator it drops out of sight.

How to find it

Use the Big Dipper. The two stars at the end of the Dipper's bowl (opens in a new tab) point the way. The National Park Service (opens in a new tab) gives the old rule of thumb: carry the line on about five times the gap between those two stars. The line leads to Polaris, at the end of the Little Dipper's handle.

Not the brightest star

A common belief is that the North Star outshines the rest. It does not: ESA's Hipparcos list (opens in a new tab) ranks it 47th, and Ian Ridpath (opens in a new tab) places it just on the fringe of the top 50. What makes it special is where it is, not how bright.

Three stars, and an argument about the distance

Polaris is a triple star system (opens in a new tab): a supergiant, a close companion that Hubble first saw directly in 2006, and a wider one visible in small telescopes. The supergiant is a Cepheid, a star that pulses in brightness, and the nearest of its kind, which makes it a yardstick for measuring distances to galaxies.

Its own distance has been hard to pin down. Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics (opens in a new tab) note that earlier estimates ranged from about 326 to 522 light-years, and cite Gaia's measurement of 445.5 light-years.

Not always the pole star

The pole drifts slowly across the stars, a wobble of Earth's axis that takes about 25,771 years (opens in a new tab) to come round. In Ptolemy's day (opens in a new tab), the second century, Polaris was about 11° from the pole and there was no bright star near it; the name stella polaris first appears in print in 1492. A couple of thousand years ago, NASA notes (opens in a new tab), the northern pole stars were Kochab and Pherkad.

The south has no bright pole star

The southern sky turns around an empty-looking patch. The IAU (opens in a new tab) name for the star nearest it is Polaris Australis, sigma Octantis, which at magnitude 5.4 needs a dark sky to see. Southern observers find south with the Southern Cross instead.

Where on Earth, and when

It rises from anywhere north of about 1°S.

North of about 1°N, it never sets.

It climbs at least 20° high, the finder's threshold for a suggestion, from anywhere north of about 19°N.

It is highest in the evening sky, at about 9 p.m. local time, in mid-December, from either hemisphere, wherever it rises. With daylight saving time, that is nearer 10 p.m. on the clock.

Worked out by this site from the Bright Star Catalogue, for a flat, clear horizon. Hills, buildings, haze and city light all cut into this; the air also lifts objects near the horizon by about half a degree. For your own place and night, use the sky finder.