η UMa. Magnitude 1.86, blue-white. Comfortably visible to the naked eye from a suburban sky.
Astronomers call it η UMa — the Bayer designation, which reads as a Greek letter ranking its brightness within its constellation. Alkaid is the name people actually use.
Alkaid shines at magnitude 1.86, making it comfortably visible to the naked eye from a suburban sky. Its B−V colour index of -0.19 makes it blue-white to the eye, corresponding to a surface temperature of over 10,000 K.
It sits at right ascension 13.79 hours and declination +49.3°. It sits well north on the sky and is comfortably placed for northern hemisphere observers.
SkyRef shows exactly where Alkaid is from your location right now — altitude, compass direction, and rise and set times.