Polaris

Tell me something; how often did you truly look at our Pole Star? If you think that the only special feature is that everything seems to revolve around it, you are wrong… Polaris is actually a nice double star (light yellow / white). If you look at it with a widefield telescope or binoculars, you may notice a string of mag 7/8 stars. Together, this forms the “engagement ring” (with Polaris being the diamond).

The diamond is pointing to the north celestial pole (just outside the field) around which the ring revolves during the day.

The secondary star is quite weak and close at 27x, but was just visible in the Skywatcher Heritage 130 from my light polluted garden. The close up was sketched using the 16″ newton.