Bob Lautner taught me the following:

The two stars that you shot are Mizar and Alcor. They are an optical double, which means they don't actually orbit each other but they are relatively close to each other. Mizar and Alcor are about 3 light years apart which is fairly close as far as star neighbors go. Our nearest neighbor is Alpha Centauri and it is 4.4 light years away.



Alcor is the smaller of the two and is 78 light years from us. Alcor is actually a binary star but the two stars are so close together we can't split them. Alcor appears a pale blue and is about twice the mass of our Sun and is about 50% bigger than the Sun in diameter. Alcor is about 10 times as bright as our Sun. Alcor is much hotter than our Sun, that is why it's color temperature is blue. If we were on a planet orbiting Alcor we wouldn't be able to see the Sun because it isn't bright enough.



Mizar is the larger and brighter of the two stars in the photo. It is 81 light years from Earth and it is also a binary star system. Like Alcor the two stars are so close together they look like one star to us. The primary of the Mizar pair is the one we actually see in the photo and it is twice the size of our Sun and 25 times as bright.

Thank you Bob!