How to find the North Star
The North Star, Polaris, sits almost exactly above Earth’s North Pole, so it stays in the same spot all night while every other star circles around it. Face north and it’s there, as high above the horizon as your latitude.
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Find it with the Big Dipper
Find the Big Dipper first. The two stars at the end of its bowl, Merak and Dubhe, are called the pointer stars. Draw a line from Merak through Dubhe and keep going about five times the gap between them. The first moderately bright star you reach is Polaris.
Polaris is also the last star in the handle of the Little Dipper, though the rest of the Little Dipper is faint and hard to see from a town.
How high to look
Polaris sits as high above your northern horizon as your latitude. From Atlanta, at about 34° north, it’s about a third of the way up the sky. From Chicago it’s about 42° up, and from Anchorage more than 60°.
A fist held out at arm’s length covers about 10°, so from most of the US the North Star is three to four fists above the horizon, due north.
Why it doesn’t move
Earth spins around an axis that happens to point almost straight at Polaris. As the planet turns, the whole sky seems to wheel around that point once a day, so Polaris barely moves while the Big Dipper and every other star circle it. That’s why travelers have used it for centuries to find north.
It won’t last forever. Earth’s axis slowly wobbles, and in about 12,000 years bright Vega will be the star nearest the pole. Around 2700 BC, the pole star was Thuban, in Draco.
What Polaris is
Polaris is a yellow-white supergiant, far bigger and brighter than the Sun, roughly 430 light-years away. It’s really a system of three stars, and the main one gently pulses in brightness every four days, though the change is too small to notice by eye.
Questions
Is the North Star the brightest star in the sky?
No. It’s only around the 48th brightest. Sirius is the brightest star. Polaris is famous for where it is, not for how bright it is.
Can you see the North Star from the Southern Hemisphere?
No. South of the equator it’s below the horizon. There’s no bright south pole star, so people there use the Southern Cross to find south instead.
Does the North Star ever move?
Barely. It sits less than a degree from the true pole and traces a tiny circle around it each day, too small to notice without measuring.
Is the North Star in the same place every night?
Yes. Unlike other stars, it’s in the same spot every night of the year and at every hour, which is what makes it so useful for finding north.