Albany has had a planetarium and history museum for years, but Gregors says this new dome doubled the size and tripled the pixels for clearer views as well as claiming cutting edge technology for big domes.

And I thought it was a little town with little ideas. Changed my mind seeing their reach for the stars, but would have changed it already had I listened first to the Freedom Singers at the just-opening Civil Rights Institute.

You might have read about it in the New York Times the day after the presidential election. Small but powerful, a community story of enduring national importance.

Icons of the civil rights movement draw travelers to specific locations: the Mall in Washington where Dr. King delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech. Churches in Atlanta and Birmingham where preaching and prior violence carry strong messages. The Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma and lunch counters in many towns.

What’s extraordinary about this new museum and institute for anybody who visits is the context of community

This is the story of the Albany civil rights movement in the 1960s, with faces and voices and personal stories. Simultaneously, it is the story of America.

The special thing here is you’re likely to meet some of the historic figures whose personal stories are told in the exhibits. They’ll be in the church next door and across the street, downtown in the coffee shop, community theater and art museum, pushing a stroller or biking the three-mile paved walkway along the Flint River.

If you can choose any time to go, start with the second Saturday of any month at 1:00 p.m.

Rutha Harris will be singing the songs of the movement with the eight-member Freedom Singers in Mount Zion Church. She’s an original, one of the four singers who traveled by her count more than 50,000 miles up and down the East Coast in the early 1960s, sharing a message of freedom and raising funds for the cause.

“I believe without the music, the movement would not have happened,” Harris says. She sings those songs today with a contagious smile, and tears.

“No I’m not sad; today is a better day. The tears are the remembering” she says, “the thinking about what you went through that you shouldn’t have had to do.”

Meeting Harris put me face-to-face with a woman sent to jail for what she believed when she was 21. That gave me new context in the museum exhibits.

Many powerful connections clearly will be available to claim when the official opening of the Albany Movement Civil Rights Institute takes place. A preliminary opening tested the waters but final parking lot details are expected to be in place before the new year. Watch the web site.

I like it a lot when my holidays or day jaunts give new fullness to something I thought I already understood.

Sometimes in the new Albany that happens in a light and easy way too. Their notion of an aquarium is river life, not the ocean, since the Flint, Chattahoochee and Apalachicola rivers impact the region.