The northern lights paid a rare visit to the Biggest Little City on Tuesday, filling the sky with reds and greens reminiscent of a nighttime sunset.

States as far south as Texas also saw the northern lights, or aurora borealis.

That's because of a geomagnetic storm that was likely caused by a coronal mass ejection , or large expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the sun. The coronal mass ejection is expected to reach earth around mid-day Wednesday.

Paul McFarlane, the director of the Fleishmann Planetarium in Reno, told the Reno Gazette Journal Wednesday morning that the earth is currently in a period of significant solar activity. That's because the sun operates on an 11- to 22-year cycle, with it flipping the earth's magnetic poles approximately every 11 years.

The geomag

See Full Page