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 and dimming at a rate of 0.02 magnitude a year. Its distance has been calculated as 5,000±800 parsecs (16,300 light-years), which puts its location in the galactic halo. Taken from the villain in "The Magnificent Seven", Calvera is the nickname given to an X-ray source known as 1RXS J141256.0+792204 in the "ROSAT All-Sky Survey Bright Source Catalog" (RASS/BSC). It has been identified as an isolated neutron star, one of the closest of its kind to Earth. Ursa Minor has two enigmatic white dwarfs. H1504+65 is a faint (magnitude 15.9) star that with the hottest surface temperature—200,000 K—yet discovered for a