By day, the terraced fields of Vietnam’s Northwest are especially enchanting in the golden sun of autumn, from September to October. Yet as sunset fades and darkness descends, a mystical and fleeting beauty unfolds, the Milky Way unfurling in a luminous arc across the sky. Illuminating the gentle curves of sleeping fields, the sky reveals the perfect harmony of nature’s wonder and the results of human toil.

By September, the Milky Way no longer stretches horizontally across the sky as it does in early summer. For night-sky photographers, this is the tail end of the season, when the Milky Way appears to rise almost vertically from the horizon, sometimes sharing the heavens with the moon depending on the time of month. Even so, its shimmering light is enough to outline the graceful sweep of ripe rice stalks bending under their own weight, following the curves of the terraced slopes ready for harvest.