The main star, Polaris A, is a giant with 4.5 times the mass of the Sun and a diameter of 45 million kilometers. It is a classic Cepheid variable, the closest to us in the whole Milky Way. Polaris B can be seen even with a modest telescope. It was found by William Herschel in 1780 using one of the most powerful telescopes of the time: his own reflecting telescope. The nearby dwarf star, Ab, was predicted in 1929, but only seen quite recently. The dwarf orbits as close to A as Uranus is to our sun.