Pollux (star) in the context of "Bayer designation"

The Winter Hexagon is an asterism appearing to be in the form of a hexagon with vertices at Rigel, Aldebaran, Capella, Pollux, Procyon, and Sirius. It is mostly upon the Northern Hemisphere's celestial sphere. On most locations on Earth (except the South Island of New Zealand and the south of Chile and Argentina and further south), this asterism is visible in the evening sky at the equator from approximately December to June, and in the morning sky from July to the end of November, while in the evenings on the northern hemisphere it is less months visible between December and June, and on the southern hemisphere less months between July and November. In the tropics and southern hemisphere, this (then called "summer hexagon") can be extended with the bright star Canopus in the south.

Smaller and more regularly shaped is the Winter Triangle, an approximately equilateral triangle that shares two vertices (Sirius and Procyon) with the larger asterism. The third vertex is Betelgeuse, which lies near the center of the hexagon. These three stars are three of the ten brightest objects, as viewed from Earth, outside the Solar System. Betelgeuse is also particularly easy to locate, being a shoulder of Orion, which assists stargazers in finding the triangle. Once the triangle is located, the larger hexagon may then be found.

Phi Geminorum, Latinized from φ Geminorum, is a binary star in the constellation Gemini, to the southeast of Pollux. It is visible to the naked eye with an apparent visual magnitude of 4.95. Based upon an annual parallax shift of 14.66 mas, this system is located around 220 light years from the Sun.

The two components of this system have a circular orbit with a period of 582 days. The primary component is an A-type main sequence star with a stellar classification of A3 V. It is around 600 million years old and spinning relatively rapidly with a projected rotational velocity of 165 km/s. This rate of spin is giving the star an oblate shape with an equatorial bulge that is 6% larger than the polar radius. The star has nearly double the mass of the Sun and radiates 36.5 times the solar luminosity from its outer atmosphere at an effective temperature of 8,551 K.