Drawing from Mary Louise Pratt’s encounter model of cultural history and transculturation (1992) and the Foucauldian notion of knowledge systems as “technologies of power” (Foucault 1995), this paper examines Abbasid period (750-1258 CE) Arab astronomical texts as contact zones through which new astronomical expertise fragmented and redefined multivalent indigenous Arab astronomical traditions that once figured prominently in the daily lives of herdsmen, farmers and fishermen, and indeed much of society (Varisco 2000). Pratt (1992) has introduced the term “contact zone” to “refer to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.” Like modern colonial encounters, Abbasid period encounters often took place through written contact zones, especially concerning the translation of foreign sciences. These acts of translation did not result in the mere passive reception of Greek, Indian and Persian astronomies within the corpus of Arab astronomy, but rather the adaptation and transformation of this knowledge consistent with the process of transculturation (Burke 1997). As a case study of framing astronomies as contact zones and astronomical knowledge as a technology of power, my research comparatively analyzes the historiography of Arab astronomy by some of its Abbasid historians--Quṭrub (d. 821 CE), Ibn Qutayba (d. 889) and al-Ṣūfī (d. 986), among others--and frames these histories as contact zones within which their authors encountered indigenous Arab “celestial complexes,” a term that I am using to designate a grouping of stars that share a certain kind of cultural significance. From the skeletal descriptions of Quṭrub when the lunar stations were not yet fully incorporated, to the vivid, living descriptions of Ibn Qutayba that centered upon the lunar stations, to the reorganization of Arab astronomical culture according to the Greek interpretation of the sky under al-Ṣūfī, each work represents a significant shift in the authors’ understanding of Arab astronomy. Despite the great variety in the writing styles and backgrounds of the authors, a common trend is clear: the transculturation of foreign ideas about the sky that ultimately dismembered the Arab celestial complexes.