The series arranges the sky by divinity and phenomenon. Its first large section belongs to Sin, the moon: omens from the day of the month on which the crescent first appears, from halos and earthshine, and above all from eclipses, graded by month, day, watch of the night and the quarter of the disk where the shadow enters, each configuration matched to a forecast for one of the lands, Akkad, Elam, Subartu or Amurru.
The Shamash section reads the sun, its colour at rising, parhelia, and eclipses; the Adad section reads the weather as omen, thunder in a clear sky, rain in season and out; and the final section, under Ishtar, treats the fixed stars and planets, Venus above the rest, her risings, settings and conjunctions. Every entry keeps the same grammar, if this is seen, then this will follow, and the forecasts concern the state, the king, the harvest, war, flood and pestilence, never private persons, for the sky wrote to the realm. The scholars who used the series did not wait passively on its verdicts: an evil eclipse omen could be met with the substitute-king ritual, in which a stand-in took the danger while the true king withdrew, the sign read as warning rather than doom. Tablet sixty three, the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, preserves observation records from the Old Babylonian dynasty and has served modern scholarship, cautiously, as a chronological anchor for the second millennium.