# What are “cycles of anomaly” and “cycles of longitude”?

In several early (pre-1600) astronomical texts I read about "cycles of anomaly" and "cycles of longitude", but it us unclear to me what these terms mean. They were clearly familiar to authors at the time and are undefined in any of the texts I've looked through.

How were these terms employed in pre-1600s solar system models? What modern astronomical terms or observable events do they correspond to?

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Perhaps context would help. How are these being used? Today "longitudes" are typical angles as you might imagine, like from the pericenter, to the center or a focus, and then to the object. "Anomalies" are stranger but sometimes more convenient measures, and differ from longitudes when, for instance, orbits are eccentric. They can measure angles to projections of an object to various circular orbits (eccentric and true anomaly) for instance. Or they can be rescalings of swept-out area (= time), as in mean anomaly. –  Chris White Sep 24 '12 at 3:10

Cycles of anomaly are lappings of a planet by the Earth. If there are $CA$ of them and the Earth orbited the Sun $N$ times during the time, then one may determine that the planet has orbited $N\pm CA$ times.
In the Ptolemaic model each conjunction occurs after $S/P_D$ cycles beyond a full cycle of the epicycle, where $S$ is the synodic period and $P_D$ is the period of the deferent (e.g. the period of the planet, for superior planets). –  raxacoricofallapatorius Sep 25 '12 at 20:33