HD 150706 is a 7th magnitude

Apparent magnitude

The apparent magnitude of a celestial body is a measure of its brightness as seen by an observer on Earth, adjusted to the value it would have in the absence of the atmosphere...

 star

Star

A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...

 in the constellation

Constellation

In modern astronomy, a constellation is an internationally defined area of the celestial sphere. These areas are grouped around asterisms, patterns formed by prominent stars within apparent proximity to one another on Earth's night sky....

 of Ursa Minor

Ursa Minor

Ursa Minor , also known as the Little Bear, is a constellation in the northern sky. Like the Great Bear, the tail of the Little Bear may also be seen as the handle of a ladle, whence the name Little Dipper...

. It is a remarkably Sun

Sun

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...

-like yellow dwarf

Yellow dwarf

A G-type main-sequence star , often called a yellow dwarf, is a main-sequence star of spectral type G and luminosity class V. Such a star has about 0.8 to 1.2 solar masses and surface temperature of between 5,300 and 6,000 K., Tables VII, VIII...

 (spectral type G0V) being only 2% less massive than the Sun

Sun

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...

.

Distance to the star, 89 light years, is enough that it is not visible to the unaided eye. However, it is an easy target for binoculars

Binoculars

Binoculars, field glasses or binocular telescopes are a pair of identical or mirror-symmetrical telescopes mounted side-by-side and aligned to point accurately in the same direction, allowing the viewer to use both eyes when viewing distant objects...

. It is located only about 10° from the northern celestial pole

Celestial pole

The north and south celestial poles are the two imaginary points in the sky where the Earth's axis of rotation, indefinitely extended, intersects the imaginary rotating sphere of stars called the celestial sphere...

 so it is always visible on the northern hemisphere except for near the equator

Equator

An equator is the intersection of a sphere's surface with the plane perpendicular to the sphere's axis of rotation and containing the sphere's center of mass....

. Likewise, it is never visible in most of the southern hemisphere.

The existence of an extrasolar planet

Extrasolar planet

An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet outside the Solar System. A total of such planets have been identified as of . It is now known that a substantial fraction of stars have planets, including perhaps half of all Sun-like stars...

 orbiting this star was announced at the Scientific Frontiers in Research on Extrasolar Planets conference in 2002 http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?2003ASPC..294...17U&db_key=AST&nosetcookie=1. The claimed planet had a minimum mass

Minimum mass

In astronomy, minimum mass is the lower-bound calculated mass of observed objects such as planets, stars and binary systems, nebulae, and black holes. Minimum mass is a widely cited statistic for extrasolar planets...

 equal to the mass of Jupiter

Jupiter

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn,...

 and was thought to be located in an elliptical orbit with a period of 264 day

Day

A day is a unit of time, commonly defined as an interval equal to 24 hours. It also can mean that portion of the full day during which a location is illuminated by the light of the sun...

s. However independent measurements of the star failed to confirm the existence of the planet http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/abs/2007ApJ...657..533W and the planet does not appear in the current web version of the Catalog of Nearby Exoplanets. http://exoplanets.org/planets.shtml