Synastry, Draconic or Uranian? Which Relationship Report to Run
If you are trying to understand a relationship, the report you choose matters, because each one is looking at something different.
Synastry shows how the two of you actually interact.
Draconic Synastry looks beneath the everyday personality layer at why a connection can feel unusually familiar, significant or hard to explain.
Uranian Synastry measures the same two charts with a finer instrument, finding exact structural contacts the usual method does not register.
You do not need to run all three. Start with the question you are actually trying to answer.
Three reports, three questions
| If you want to know | Run |
|---|---|
| What is this relationship like to live in? Why does the same argument keep coming back? | Synastry |
| Why does this person matter more than the facts explain? What is going on beneath the personalities? | Draconic Synastry |
| What exactly is connecting us, in more precise terms than the standard reading gives? | Uranian Synastry |
Every chart pictured below is the same real couple, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, whose birth data has long been published. Using one pair throughout means the differences you see come from the techniques, not from the people.
One distinction worth holding on to
These three keep both charts intact and report where they touch. Your chart stays yours, your partner's stays theirs, and because both survive, all three can tell you who brings what. Your Saturn on their Moon is a different event from their Saturn on your Moon.
Composite, Davison and Coalescent do the opposite. They merge the two charts into a single new one and read the relationship as an object in its own right. The picture below is the whole difference.
That is why running a composite when you wanted synastry feels like the wrong answer to your question. It is answering a different one.
Synastry: how the relationship works
This is the practical report. It compares the two birth charts directly, so everything it says is about personality and daily life: how you talk to each other, what each of you needs in order to feel secure, what creates the attraction, and where the same tension is likely to keep repeating.
If you want to know what the relationship is actually like to live in, this is where to begin. It also gives you the clearest foundation for reading the other two, since it supplies the vocabulary they build on.
Underneath, three things carry most of the weight. Inter-chart aspects are the contacts between one person's planets and the other's. House overlays show which area of your life each of their planets lands in, run in both directions, because their Venus in your seventh house is a different experience from your Venus in theirs. Scoring then sorts those contacts by weight, and the report closes by naming the hardest ones in your particular pairing with something practical to do about each.
Draconic Synastry: why it feels significant
Use this when the emotional weight of a relationship seems larger than ordinary synastry accounts for. It is less about whether you function well together, and more about recognition, familiarity, and why one person can feel unusually important to you.
It is also the report for a connection that is hard to leave without being able to say why, and for one that felt meaningful before there was any evidence to justify it.
The method is simpler than it sounds. A draconic chart is your natal chart recalculated so the Moon's North Node sits at 0 degrees of Aries, with every other position shifted by the same amount. Nothing is invented and nothing is estimated. It is the same sky measured from a different starting point, and the tradition reads that starting point as the soul's frame, not the personality's. The report then compares your draconic chart to your partner's natal, theirs to yours, and both draconic charts to each other, and reads the soulmate asteroids alongside.
Uranian Synastry: a finer instrument
This is not a deeper level of the relationship. It is the same level measured differently, with a much tighter tolerance. Where standard synastry works to several degrees, this works to about one, so it picks up exact structural contacts that the usual method treats as background.
Run it when you already understand the ordinary synastry and want that precision, or when the standard reading comes out unremarkable while the relationship plainly is not. Because the contacts are so tight, the report includes far less, and each item it does include carries more weight.
The method comes from the Hamburg School and it sets signs, houses and rulerships aside entirely, working from midpoints and symmetry on that dial. A midpoint is the halfway point between two factors. A planetary picture is what appears when a third factor lands on that halfway point. Here the midpoint always belongs to one person and the body landing on it to the other, which is what makes it a statement about the pair, and both directions are scanned separately.
It needs an exact birth time for both people. The Ascendant and the Meridian are among the factors it uses, and both move about a degree every four minutes, so an hour of uncertainty shifts them roughly fifteen degrees. Because contacts here must fall within about one degree, a guessed birth time does not give you a slightly wrong reading. It gives you contacts that are not there. If either time is approximate, run the other two and leave this one.
The three side by side
| Synastry | Draconic Synastry | Uranian Synastry | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answers | How do we get along | What is beneath the personalities | What exactly is connecting |
| Charts compared | Both natal | Draconic to natal, and draconic to draconic | Both natal, on a 90° dial |
| Core technique | Inter-chart aspects and house overlays | Node-rotated charts, three layers | Midpoints, symmetry, planetary pictures |
| Signs and houses | Yes | Yes | No, set aside by design |
| Typical orb | Standard, adjustable | Standard, adjustable | About 1° |
| Extra factors | Vertex, Juno, Nodes, Part of Marriage | Eight soulmate asteroids | Eight hypothetical points |
| Exact birth time | Preferred | Preferred | Required, both people |
Not sure which one to choose
If you have not run anything yet, run Synastry. Almost every question people bring to a relationship chart is answered somewhere in it, and it makes the other two easier to read.
If you have read the synastry and something still feels unaccounted for, add Draconic. If the synastry already explains the relationship well, the draconic layer may add context without changing the picture.
If you want that finer level of detail and both birth times are exact, add Uranian. It is the most specialised of the three, so it is usually the last to run.
One thing worth avoiding: running all three at once. Every technique finds something, so three reports together give you three sets of terminology and no clear answer. Taking them one at a time is how you work out which one describes your situation.
What none of them will tell you
None of them says whether to stay. A chart describes tendencies and pressure points. It does not know what the two of you have already worked through or what you are each willing to do. A hard contact in a twenty year marriage is describing something you have long since built around.
The compatibility score is not a grade. It shows which contacts carry more weight in this particular comparison, which makes it useful for finding where to look. It does not measure the quality or the future of the relationship.
If a reading contradicts what you know about your own relationship, trust what you know. These reports are a way of getting language for patterns you can already feel. A description that does not match is a description that is wrong, and the first thing to check is the birth data, since an approximate birth time moves houses and angles more than most people expect.
Composite, Davison and Coalescent
Those three are the other family, the one that merges two charts into a single new chart. They answer a different question again and they disagree with each other in useful ways, so they have their own article.
The short version: Composite averages the midpoints between your two charts and describes the relationship's psychological tone. Davison casts a real chart for the midpoint in time and place between your two births, which makes it usable for timing. Coalescent uses a harmonic method based on the shortest arc between positions. They are not three versions of the same thing.
All of these are free and take the same input, two sets of birth data. Each report tells you at the top which settings it used, and you can change them.
Related guides
- How to read a synastry chart, a section by section walkthrough once you have run it.
- Finding or rectifying a birth time, worth reading before the Uranian report in particular.
- The Draconic Soul Blueprint, which applies the same nodal idea to a single chart.
