Ursa Major do not have long tails, and Jewish astronomers considered Alioth, Mizar, and Alkaid instead to be three cubs following their mother, while the Native Americans saw them as three hunters. Noted children's book author H. A. Rey, in his 1952 book "The Stars: A New Way to See Them," () had a different asterism in mind for Ursa Major, that instead had the "bear" image of the constellation oriented with Alkaid as the tip of the bear's nose, and the "handle" of the Big Dipper part of the constellation forming the outline of the top of the bear's head and
Ursa Minor to complete an orbit and is 6.8 AU distant from its Sun. Ursa Minor is rather devoid of deep-sky objects. The Ursa Minor Dwarf, a dwarf spheroidal galaxy, was discovered by Albert George Wilson of the Lowell Observatory in the Palomar Sky Survey in 1955. Its centre is around light-years distant from Earth. In 1999, Kenneth Mighell and Christopher Burke used the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm that it had a single burst of star formation that lasted around 2 billion years that took place around 14 billion years ago, and that the galaxy was probably as old as the