What are the differences between sidereal and draconic charts compared to tradition or tropical? What can you use them for and what do they mean?
this is actually a pretty huge topic and something i might write more extensively on later but let's do a rundown here.
what is traditional is going to depend a lot on where you are from and who you learn from. vedic and western tropical are the two most traditonal ones i think, and it seems like you are referring to tropical here, but i want to be clear that's not always the case.
so, tropical: this doesn't take into account the precession of the equinoxes over thousands of years, which is why it no longer lines up with the visible stars. i discuss this in more detail in this book and it's also something you can do your own research on if you wish. in this system each sign is just a thirty-degree chunk of the sky, and the 0 degree of aries is determined by the day of the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere (autumnal in south) NOT by the actual beginning of the constellation of stars that looks like aries the ram. i do not have any good scientific reason why this method should work better than any other, but my experience is that it is the best, and it is very old and widely used around the world so others must agree! i use this for pretty much everything although i know a thing or two about some other chart systems.
sidereal: DOES account for the precession of the equinoxes and DOES more or less line up with the actual stars as a result. but make no mistake, there's more than one way to do a sidereal chart. for instance, vedic astrology popular in india is one sidereal system. it uses the same 12 zodiac signs as the tropical system i use, but additional information and if i understand right also each sign is 30 degrees so it doesn't line up perfectly with the stars (someone correct me on this if i'm wrong in the replies please~). but there are other sidereal systems that don't have evenly sized signs, or they do but they incorporate eg the 13th sign, ophiuchus. i have written some before about how i feel like these sorts of systems SHOULD be more accurate but in my personal experience never are. the physicist/astronomer in me doesn't like that but whatever, i don't make the rules.
one thing i have heard is that while tropical is best for knowing thyself, sidereal or at least vedic is better for making predictions. i'm digging into that a little bit on my own time but i think tropical does predictions fairly well itself if you know what you're doing! since i am not as well-versed in vedic i still use tropical for my predictions and while i may not know the minute details it never really gets the vibe wrong.
draconic: a bit of a different thing. i offer these readings in my etsy. like everything i do, it varies a little bit from the most traditional/conventional manner. but it seems to work nicely. i think this style of chart has its origin in vedic astrology where the lunar nodes are the head and tail of the dragon, but it seems a lot of people do this chart in a tropical system anyway. it's defined by making the north node the 0 degree of aries and building the rest of the chart around that. so the planets and spacing of everything are the same as in the tropical natal chart, but the signs change. the idea is that this shows you something about your karma, your soul, your overarching personality in a way that is bigger than your personal egoic small self life as you know it. it's very esoteric and cool.
draconic charts are always really similar to natal charts. they are for a *person*. but you can do vedic or tropical charts about an individual, a meeting, a synastry, an event, a horary chart, etc. so that is another difference.
another thing i want to mention which you didn't ask explicitly but might interest you is all of the above are geocentric approaches. you can also do heliocentric astrology! i'm delving into that too because that's one of those things my science brain wants to work so much, lol. it is not widely practiced in the mainstream but astro dienst will generate heliocentric charts if you check off the right boxes. it's fun to play with. the big change is you no longer have a sun sign, you have an earth sign, and it is opposite whatever your natal sun sign is in tropical (eg i'm a taurus sun, but in heliocentric i have my earth in scorpio.)
that seems like a long post but seriously it just scratches the surface. i hope it helps anyway, and maybe spurs some further investigation! thank you for the excellent question <3 will definitely be reblogging this one for posterity~
