Rab Nebula Jacket – The Stuffing

At first glance the Nebula looks suspiciously like a classic micro-baffled down jacket, but inside those narrow baffles lurks a down-like synthetic fill produced by 3M and called Cirrus. It’s claimed to combine ‘almost all the key benefits of natural down and synthetic fillings, whilst avoiding their limitations’.

Realistically, one of those limitations for most synthetics is simply that they don’t have that beguiling, puffy down look, but the more obvious plus is that they work better in damp conditions, though the development of water resistant down and down/synthetic blended fills has blurred the lines a little.

Rab Nebula Jacket – Performance

The Nebula may look like a down jacket, but it doesn’t quite have the light, airy, high-lofting feel and it’s simply not as warm for its weight. For comparison, the Rab Electron down jacket that we also have in, is around 60g lighter, but considerably warmer – it’s also £70 more expensive.

That’s missing the point a little though as the Nebula’s real attraction is reasonable warmth, reasonable weight and packability combined with better all-round weather resistance and general knock-about bouncebackability – sorry – than down.

The Endurance outer fabric is pretty water resistant, but in heavier rain, the jacket eventually leaks through the seams leaving you wet. It dries really fast though, we deliberately soaked the test jacket then hung it up to dry and it was back to normal impressively quickly. It also retains reasonable effectiveness when it is damp.

The fit is a sort of medium with a drop-tail. It does have the potential to do double-duty as a belay jacket helped by the competent helmet hood and bum-protecting drop-tail, or you can can layer it under a shell if necessary.

As you’d expect from Rab, adjusters, pulls and the main YKK Vislon zip all worked well  and the jacket packs away neatly into the lefthand pocket. Overall build quality is good.