Synastry, Composite, and Davison: Three Different Questions
Two people ask what their combined chart looks like, and that one question hides three different computations. A synastry reading keeps both people's own charts exactly as computed and compares them point by point. A composite chart discards both original charts and builds a third one from the midpoints between them. A Davison chart also builds a third chart, but from an actual midpoint moment in time and place between the two births, computed fresh rather than averaged from existing positions. This page states plainly which of the three this product runs, and why the other two are not just a smaller version of the same idea.
Nothing below ranks the three methods. Each answers a different question about two people's charts, and treating them as interchangeable is a common way for a reading to describe something it never actually computed.
Synastry only — no composite, no Davison
This product computes synastry. Every pair reading starts from two independent birth charts — one per person, each produced by that person's own natal computation — and compares them directly: aspects between points, and points placed into houses, in both directions. Nothing in the reading engine averages two people's positions into a third chart, and nothing computes a chart for a blended time or place between two births; the step that feeds a chart into a pair reading builds exactly one chart from exactly one person's own natal data, every time it runs.
This is also the module's own written policy, not just an absence in the code: the design notes behind this reading state directly that a pair forecast does not use a composite or a Davison chart. If a future version of this product ever adds either one, that would be a distinct, separately announced computation — not a quiet relabeling of what synastry already does.
What choosing a chart method cannot settle
A midpoint is arithmetic; a relationship is not
Averaging one person's Sun with another's produces a defensible number and no defensible claim: the arithmetic is exact, and what it is supposed to mean about two people is not carried by the arithmetic at all. That gap is the same whichever of the three constructions is used, and it is why this page describes what each one computes and stops there. Reading a computed position as a statement about a relationship is an interpretive step, and an interpretive step is not predictive — no synastry, composite, or Davison chart on this page forecasts what a relationship's future holds.
This page picks the method, not the meaning
Choosing between the three settles which computation runs. It settles nothing about what a particular contact between two charts is worth reading into, and this page deliberately leaves that authorship where it belongs, with an astrologer. It also leaves composite and Davison interpretation alone entirely: a product that computes neither has no standing to teach anyone how to read them.
What each of the three computes
Synastry: two charts, compared
Both people's charts stay exactly as computed from their own birth data. A synastry reading compares them point by point — an aspect between one person's planet and the other's, or one person's point placed into the other's houses — without ever combining the two into a single new chart. Whose Venus, whose Mars, and whose houses stays part of the answer throughout, in both directions.
Composite: one chart, averaged
Traditional convention, not something this product computes: a composite chart is built by taking the midpoint between each matching pair of points — one person's Sun and the other's Sun, one person's Moon and the other's Moon, and so on through all the bodies — and reading the resulting set of midpoints as a single chart. That midpoint chart was never anyone's real chart at any real moment; it exists only as an average of two already-computed sets of positions.
Davison: one chart, recomputed
Also traditional convention, not something this product computes: a Davison chart produces a single blended chart too, but by a different route. Instead of averaging two people's already-computed positions, it finds the midpoint moment in time and the midpoint location in space between the two births, and computes planetary positions fresh for that specific moment and place — an actual moment two people could in principle have been born at together, unlike a composite's per-point average.
See what this product actually computes, applied to two real charts
The synastry reading described above — both charts kept intact, compared point by point — is what runs behind every Love Astrology reading.