The second-magnitude star that marks the bend in the handle of the Big Dipper, ζ Ursae Majoris. Mizar was the first telescopic visual binary to be discovered (1650), the first ever to be photographed (1857), and the first star discovered to be a spectroscopic binary (1889). Its distance to the Sun is 24 parsecs (7.5 × 10¹⁴ km or 4.7 × 10¹⁴ mi).