Megrez

Its story

Megrez joins bowl to handle in the Big Dipper, the quietest star of the most recognisable asterism in the northern sky. Its name comes from the Arabic «al-maghriz», «the root of the tail». A white A-class star roughly 80 light-years away, it is the dimmest of the seven yet utterly indispensable: without it, the great ladle would lose the shape that has hung in the human imagination for thousands of years.