With an apparent visual magnitude of 5.14,[2] it is faintly visible to the naked eye on a dark night.
Based upon an annual parallax|shift of 4.93 mas,[1] Pi Geminorum is located roughly 660 light years from the Sun.
[9] At the estimated distance of this star, this yields a physical size of about 56 times the radius of the Sun.
[6] It is radiating roughly a thousand times the luminosity of the Sun from its outer atmosphere at an effective temperature of 3,900 K.[7] Unexpectedly for a red giant, Pi Geminorum was found to be an X-ray source during the ROSAT all-sky survey.
The most likely source for this emission is an 11.4 magnitude companion star located at an angular separation of 21 arcseconds along a position angle of 214°.