It was a meteor shower that was like no other shower, which boomed into the most glorious display of shooting stars in 33 years, raining down flashy fireballs over the Arabian desert while putting on a more demure show in other spots.The global average peaked about 9 p.m. ET Wednesday in a storm of 1,688 meteors per hour, according to NASA’s monitoring station at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. It fell short of some predictions but still blew past the threshold of 1,000 meteors per hour to qualify as a true storm. The shower forms from dust and ice pellets shed by the comet Tempel-Tuttle. They streak into the Earth’s atmosphere at 40 miles a second and burn up. The shooting

stars and fireballs can dart anywhere overhead, but all appear to come from the direction of the constellation Leo, which gives the shower its name, Leonid.