Ursa Minor Ursa Minor Ursa Minor (Latin: "Lesser Bear", contrasting with Ursa Major), also known as the Little Bear, is a constellation in the Northern Sky. Like the Great Bear, the tail of the Little Bear may also be seen as the handle of a ladle, hence the North American name, Little Dipper: seven stars with four in its bowl like its partner the Big Dipper. It was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy, and remains one of the 88 modern constellations. Ursa Minor has traditionally been important for navigation, particularly by mariners, because of Polaris being
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