The northern lights were recently visible in Indiana.

Our nature-loving web producer, Gwen, explained the phenomenon beautifully in a message to our newsroom last week.

“The aurora borealis is visible so far south because of a particularly big storm on the sun that flung bits of the sun’s corona out towards Earth,” she explained. “The colors we see are from when those bits hit Earth’s magnetosphere. . . It’s like projectiles hitting our planet’s shield.”

We asked our community of Mirror Indy friends and neighbors to send us their best photos of the colorful night sky.

Here are a few of our favorites.