The bright star's companion is just visible to the unaided eye. The surprise comes when you point your telescope at the brighter star, called Mizar. It is itself a double star. Its two brilliantly white elements are orbiting each other at a distance about 400 times the distance from the Earth to the sun. A few eyepiece fields away from the bottom star in the Dipper's handle is a faint, round fuzzball called M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy.
Galaxies are the basic units of the universe.
They consist of hundreds of billions of stars accumulated in large islands separated from each other by vast quantities of practically nothing at all. The Whirlpool is, like our own Milky Way Galaxy, a beautiful spiral, with its pinwheel arms stretching outward from a bright central hub. In a small telescope, you'll see the hub. Next, start from the same star and point your 'scope in the opposite direction. You'll see another face-on spiral called M101, which is somewhat larger and fainter than M51.