β UMa. Magnitude 2.37, white. Comfortably visible to the naked eye from a suburban sky.
Astronomers call it β UMa — the Bayer designation, which reads as a Greek letter ranking its brightness within its constellation. Merak is the name people actually use.
Merak shines at magnitude 2.37, making it comfortably visible to the naked eye from a suburban sky. Its B−V colour index of -0.02 makes it white to the eye, corresponding to a surface temperature of around 8,000 K.
It sits at right ascension 11.03 hours and declination +56.4°. It sits well north on the sky and is comfortably placed for northern hemisphere observers.
SkyRef shows exactly where Merak is from your location right now — altitude, compass direction, and rise and set times.