Moon Rigel Pro review – a lot of front light for your money and straightforward to use too

As lights get bigger and more powerful, you now end up getting a lot for your money at around the 1,000-lumen mark, and the Moon Rigel Pro is a great example of that. It’s enough light for most people, it’s compact, and it’s easy to use.

The Rigel Pro is a small, torch-style light with twin LEDs that pump out 1,000 lumens of illumination. It’s nicely made, with a solid aluminium casing, and it’s nice and light at just over 100g.

It’s IPX7 water resistant, which means it’s fine for anything up to riding underwater. The light has a Garmin quarter-turn mount and comes with a rubber strap for fitting to your bars, as well as a GoPro mount for underneath your out-front mount.

The Rigel Pro has a refractor on the lens to point more of the light down on the road and less of it into the eyes of oncoming road users. It’s simple and pretty effective, and you can take the lens off and turn it by 180° if you’re mounting the light the other way up. You can even take it off for a full flood beam, if you prefer that – but even off-road there’s plenty of spread even with the refractor.

Moon front lights have always split static and flashing beams. You double click the power button to switch between the two. The Rigel Pro has two static modes, which by default are 1,000 and 350 lumens. You can however change them to any two of seven different brightness options, which go all the way down to just 50 lumens.

That’s useful for extending the battery life, which isn’t that long – just a claimed 1:45hrs in full beam, and ours dimmed before that. At 350 lumens, you’ll get about 5hrs, and if you drop the low mode to 200 lumens, you’ll get through a whole night – in summer, anyway.

The battery indicator changes colour at 50%, 25% and 10% and is okay – although not knowing whether you’re at 100% or 51% makes longer rides a bit of a lottery if you haven’t charged up before you go.

There’s an ‘intelligent’ mode where the light will sense the ambient light and turn itself on, and also turn off when your bike is static, but come on people: it’s one press of a button. I think I can manage that.

I’ve ridden the Moon Rigel Pro around the local lanes and I think the beam shape is a pretty good compromise between illuminating the things you want to see and not wasting too much light above the eyeline. It’s not a cut-off beam by any stretch of the imagination, but it is bottom-weighted and I didn’t feel particularly self-conscious about using it on the roads, even in full beam.

The 350-lumen setting is fine for cruising around at night, and even the 200-lumen mode is okay, although you need to take a bit more care at that point. To have a tiny light like this, which costs sixty quid, see you through a whole night is really good going, and at the other end there’s enough light to venture off-road.

I don’t have much bad to say about the Rigel Pro. It’s easy to fit, the beam shape works well, the controls are simple and well-though-out and it’s a solid choice for a light for your bars or your out-front mount. Okay, the battery life isn’t top of the class, but it’ll probably get you round most rides you’re likely to do over winter, if you’re dedicated with your charging.

There are some other great lights at about this output and price, most notably the £64.99 Ravemen K1000, which has similar run-times and – in my opinion – a slightly nicer beam shape.

So it gains a point for that, but it loses one for having to cycle through flashing to get back to full beam. I thought that light was excellent, and I think this one is too. It’s enough light for enough time for most people, and it’s a great package at a good price.

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