Lately, I’ve developed an unhealthy fixation on the presidential election. Maybe you too. THE New York Times The needle hasn’t started twitching yet, but for weeks now I’ve had that full-body fourth-trimester feeling and an urge to speculate endlessly about the mood swings of people in swing states. We’re told this race is among the closest in American history. I just want to know who will win. Nothing else seems to exist.

Today, as we wait for the networks to start calling states, I try to zoom out, to remember that there is a cosmos beyond Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It’s not too difficult, once you find the necessary resolution. Whatever cruelties befall our current historical era (and there are many), we have cameras that can see across the universe, and anyone with a decent internet connection can freely browse the snapshots that she took. I keep it photo archive for the James Webb Space Telescope, the most distant of all, in my favorites bar. When I find myself a little too immersed in the political news cycle, I click on the latest releases.

The image at the top of this page was posted at the end of October and for me it was an instant favorite. I love its rendered colors: shock pink, pale chartreuse, and lightsaber blue. I love the three-dimensionality, the way your eye is drawn through the torn veils of orange and red in the foreground to a bright inner sanctuary. I love the distant galaxies scattered throughout the frame, their shapes and orientations, the heartbreaking idea that together they contain many billions of planets.

I don’t blame anyone who wants to experience these images only on that level, as beautiful splashes of light. Sometimes it’s nice to look at a dark, sparkling expanse without talking about metallicity or ionized gas. But last week, I was in the mood to follow any stray curiosity, as long as it wasn’t directly related to the election. I wanted to know what was happening in this image.

To capture it, the Webb telescope was pointed beyond the limits of the Milky Way, towards one of its satellites, the Small Magellanic Cloud. Astronomers sometimes adopt an intimidating tone when talking about the Small Magellanic Cloud. They use diminutive terms. They call it a dwarf and point out that it contains only a few billion stars at most, instead of hundreds of billions. But they are grateful that it was trapped by the gravitational weight of the Milky Way, because it serves as a time capsule. Conditions inside are similar to those that were common throughout the universe 5 billion years ago, eons closer to when star formation was at its peak. The Small Magellanic Cloud offers a vision of the cosmos as it was in more generative times.

There are other ways to see what things looked like back then: Astronomers can point cameras directly at galaxies 5 billion light years away and capture the light that left them 5 billion light years ago of years. But because these galaxies are very far away, the images end up becoming blurry. You cannot distinguish single stars. That’s why it’s such a boon to have the Small Magellanic Cloud in our garden.

The Webb telescope trained its eye on him for a total of 14 hours, spread over three months. Its infrared sensors were able to peer into large clouds of dust and gas to capture a grand spectacle of creation, a cluster of erupting blue stars. You can see the cluster, just left of center. About 2 million years ago, or yesterday, on a cosmic scale, the thermonuclear core of the largest star ignited. It quickly grew to a frightening size, 40 times more massive than the sun. The nearby blue stars lit up around the same time. Ultraviolet shockwaves cascaded outward from each of them, creating overlapping bubbles of light across a huge volume of space.

The new stars are still shining, but astronomers don’t expect them to last more than 10 million years. This makes them flash bulbs compared to our 10 billion year old sun. But even fleeting stars can trigger large chain reactions. We can see one unfolding in this image. Violent stellar winds blow away stars, compressing surrounding pockets of gas which are themselves igniting. These are the little points of light that dot the innermost fringes of the red and orange sails.

I texted Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which oversees not only the James Webb Space Telescope but also many other flagship U.S. observatories. To do his job, Mountain has to think about many different types of light. I wanted to know what struck him most in this image. He said it made him wonder what it would have been like to look at the entire universe with infrared eyes 5 billion years ago. At the time, the cosmos had not yet expanded as much as it does today. The galaxies would have been closer together. In all directions, a violent and creative process would have taken place.

I’m not here to peddle cosmic escapism. I will not claim that because the universe is so big, so great, and so old, human affairs are of little importance. People are important. In the entire cosmos, we don’t yet know of anyone else building space telescopes. Our elections have meaning, even if their consequences do not extend light years. These celestial vistas don’t take away from that, but they may offer some respite, especially tonight. If you need to look into an abyss, it might as well be beautiful.