So you want to be a space prospector, searching those beautiful ring systems for valuable mineral hot spots, maybe even finding the legendary El Dorado, triple overlapping Painite hot spots! And maybe mapping a few valuable terraformable bodies while you're at it for fun and profit. Well here's a taste of the "fun" you can expect in your search. I'm not going to go into the whole bit about the FSS literally turning sideways and flipping out on an acid trip, I'll give FDev the benefit of the doubt that that behavior is unintended and will be fixed ASAP.
Pick a system to explore and jump to it. Honk (and scoop, if that's the way you roll, swooping around or parking by the star till your fuel tank is full).
Verify that there actually are more bodies to scan (no "system scan complete" message from honk). Find another system if not.
Fire up the FSS.
If no targets are immediately obvious I like to select a frequency between the gas giants and the icy/rocky bodies (assuming both are present) to make use of the helpful arrows point the way towards either set.
Find the ecliptic and scan along it till you see a fuzzy light area (without the dashed circle indicating a non-planetary signal, unless you want to check all those out too, though it means a lot more frequency shifting back and forth unless you do them all separately, first or last) or the arrows light up and point towards something.
Aim cursor at center of fuzzy light area and adjust frequency until it shows a solid circle then aim cursor inside it and zoom in.
If zooming in just shows two or more circles, pick one and aim in it then zoom again.
Repeat until a system body is revealed. If you care about finding xeno sites or the like, WAIT HERE WHILE THE SIGNALS FOUND BOX CIRCLE JERKS FOR UP TO 90 SECONDS if there are geological sites AND TAKE NOTES, because this is the ONLY place short of planetary orbit where you will be told about those xeno sites. The geo sites will show up in the system map later, but not the xeno stuff.
Zoom back out to the previous level and pick another circle to focus on. WHOOPS! what? I'M NOT WHERE I WAS, WHERE WAS I AND WHERE ARE THE OTHER THREE CIRCLES THAT WERE RIGHT NEXT TO IT? DANG IT I HAVE TO SCROLL ALL THE WAY OVER THERE AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN????
Repeat until all bodies are discovered, up to 50 (or more?) times, possibly moving your ship if some are occluded by the star.
Close FSS and open System Map, select the details tab and start looking at the worlds you might want to detail map or skip right to checking out the ones with rings. (There's lots of strategies here for picking map-worthy targets by type/picture, not bothering if you noticed nothing but Ice worlds while in FSS, etc. I usually use detail tab to check for terraformable worlds including the rare rocky ones, you can also look based on temperature to only check in the goldilocks zone).
Travel to your selected planet and stop within DSS range. I find there's a sweet spot range where the body is about three times the size of your target reticle that is easiest to target probes from. But if that puts you close to a really small body aim to the side to make sure you don't hit it at 30km/s while in DSS!
Open DSS.
Fire probes to reveal surface. You can skip this if you're only interested in the rings and don't want to fire another 20 or 30 probes to map yet another gas giant for 4000 credits.
If body has rings and you are interested in their contents, fire another probe at each ring you are interested.
Exit DSS to actually see what is in each hot spot. OOOPS, HOTSPOTS VANISHED COMPLETELY OR SHOW BUT CONTENTS DON'T! (This is happening to me EVERY SINGLE TIME NOW)
LOG OFF, LOG BACK IN. Yep, as if combat logging and logging to board flip weren't enough, now you gotta scan log if you want to see those hot spots you just scanned.
Open DSS to reveal hot spots OOOPS DSS DOESN'T WORK UNLESS IN SUPERCRUISE!
Throttle up and engage supercruise OOOPS SUPERCRUISE NOT ALLOWED WHILE HARDPOINTS ARE DEPLOYED!! what?? Activating DSS opens hardpoints while not supercruising even though it wont actually work but works fine and doesn't open the hardpoints if activated while supercruising???
Retract hardpoints and engage supercruise taking care to cut throttle immediately after it engages so you don't proceed to slam into the body.
Now you can hopefully see the hot spots AND their contents. IF NOT RELOG AND TRY AGAIN.
If you're trying to find overlapping hot spots you may not be able to resolve/target them visually from orbit if the centers are close enough together. The only way to be sure is to open the Navigation panel, filter for signals, and select each one that's close to another one at a time, exit Nav and eyeball the ring to see where the selected hotspot is, then go back into Nav, select another one close to the first, exit Nav again and eyeball the new one to see if it's in the same place as the previous.
Repeat as necessary for every hotspot close to another of the same type.
Repeat ring scan process for each ring you're interested in.
Repeat Body scan process for each body you're interested in.
Repeat entire system scan process for as many systems as you want to explore.
Enjoy encountering each of several bugs and dubious "features" dozens of times in each large system you scan.
Write stabby post about a gameplay process which was cobbled together over the years with a couple of minor bad decisions and with "little" "non-severe" bugs that probably resulted from too little testing/feedback and failure to consider the overall process and how those small bugs and bad decisions have oversized impacts in the flow of a play session, especially when encountered over and over and over and over and over again. I get that the search for overlapping hot spots is a pretty esoteric, possibly quixotic, and totally voluntary task (one could argue so is playing the game), and it's going to be repetitive to the point of tedium even under the best of circumstances. But it would be a whole lot less frustrating and burn-out inducing without the bugs and bad design choices which you can encounter literally hundreds of times in a single play session, especially the bug where the only work around is to log out and back in again! Also note that if you're not bothering with mapping terraformables but are just focused on finding and mapping rings you can skip most of the bug free parts and go straight from buggy/bad design zooming in FSS to buggy having to relog after DSSing every ring so pretty much your entire time in each system is spent working around bugs for extra "fun".
Pick a system to explore and jump to it. Honk (and scoop, if that's the way you roll, swooping around or parking by the star till your fuel tank is full).
Verify that there actually are more bodies to scan (no "system scan complete" message from honk). Find another system if not.
Fire up the FSS.
If no targets are immediately obvious I like to select a frequency between the gas giants and the icy/rocky bodies (assuming both are present) to make use of the helpful arrows point the way towards either set.
Find the ecliptic and scan along it till you see a fuzzy light area (without the dashed circle indicating a non-planetary signal, unless you want to check all those out too, though it means a lot more frequency shifting back and forth unless you do them all separately, first or last) or the arrows light up and point towards something.
Aim cursor at center of fuzzy light area and adjust frequency until it shows a solid circle then aim cursor inside it and zoom in.
If zooming in just shows two or more circles, pick one and aim in it then zoom again.
Repeat until a system body is revealed. If you care about finding xeno sites or the like, WAIT HERE WHILE THE SIGNALS FOUND BOX CIRCLE JERKS FOR UP TO 90 SECONDS if there are geological sites AND TAKE NOTES, because this is the ONLY place short of planetary orbit where you will be told about those xeno sites. The geo sites will show up in the system map later, but not the xeno stuff.
Zoom back out to the previous level and pick another circle to focus on. WHOOPS! what? I'M NOT WHERE I WAS, WHERE WAS I AND WHERE ARE THE OTHER THREE CIRCLES THAT WERE RIGHT NEXT TO IT? DANG IT I HAVE TO SCROLL ALL THE WAY OVER THERE AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN????
Repeat until all bodies are discovered, up to 50 (or more?) times, possibly moving your ship if some are occluded by the star.
Close FSS and open System Map, select the details tab and start looking at the worlds you might want to detail map or skip right to checking out the ones with rings. (There's lots of strategies here for picking map-worthy targets by type/picture, not bothering if you noticed nothing but Ice worlds while in FSS, etc. I usually use detail tab to check for terraformable worlds including the rare rocky ones, you can also look based on temperature to only check in the goldilocks zone).
Travel to your selected planet and stop within DSS range. I find there's a sweet spot range where the body is about three times the size of your target reticle that is easiest to target probes from. But if that puts you close to a really small body aim to the side to make sure you don't hit it at 30km/s while in DSS!
Open DSS.
Fire probes to reveal surface. You can skip this if you're only interested in the rings and don't want to fire another 20 or 30 probes to map yet another gas giant for 4000 credits.
If body has rings and you are interested in their contents, fire another probe at each ring you are interested.
Exit DSS to actually see what is in each hot spot. OOOPS, HOTSPOTS VANISHED COMPLETELY OR SHOW BUT CONTENTS DON'T! (This is happening to me EVERY SINGLE TIME NOW)
LOG OFF, LOG BACK IN. Yep, as if combat logging and logging to board flip weren't enough, now you gotta scan log if you want to see those hot spots you just scanned.
Open DSS to reveal hot spots OOOPS DSS DOESN'T WORK UNLESS IN SUPERCRUISE!
Throttle up and engage supercruise OOOPS SUPERCRUISE NOT ALLOWED WHILE HARDPOINTS ARE DEPLOYED!! what?? Activating DSS opens hardpoints while not supercruising even though it wont actually work but works fine and doesn't open the hardpoints if activated while supercruising???
Retract hardpoints and engage supercruise taking care to cut throttle immediately after it engages so you don't proceed to slam into the body.
Now you can hopefully see the hot spots AND their contents. IF NOT RELOG AND TRY AGAIN.
If you're trying to find overlapping hot spots you may not be able to resolve/target them visually from orbit if the centers are close enough together. The only way to be sure is to open the Navigation panel, filter for signals, and select each one that's close to another one at a time, exit Nav and eyeball the ring to see where the selected hotspot is, then go back into Nav, select another one close to the first, exit Nav again and eyeball the new one to see if it's in the same place as the previous.
Repeat as necessary for every hotspot close to another of the same type.
Repeat ring scan process for each ring you're interested in.
Repeat Body scan process for each body you're interested in.
Repeat entire system scan process for as many systems as you want to explore.
Enjoy encountering each of several bugs and dubious "features" dozens of times in each large system you scan.
Write stabby post about a gameplay process which was cobbled together over the years with a couple of minor bad decisions and with "little" "non-severe" bugs that probably resulted from too little testing/feedback and failure to consider the overall process and how those small bugs and bad decisions have oversized impacts in the flow of a play session, especially when encountered over and over and over and over and over again. I get that the search for overlapping hot spots is a pretty esoteric, possibly quixotic, and totally voluntary task (one could argue so is playing the game), and it's going to be repetitive to the point of tedium even under the best of circumstances. But it would be a whole lot less frustrating and burn-out inducing without the bugs and bad design choices which you can encounter literally hundreds of times in a single play session, especially the bug where the only work around is to log out and back in again! Also note that if you're not bothering with mapping terraformables but are just focused on finding and mapping rings you can skip most of the bug free parts and go straight from buggy/bad design zooming in FSS to buggy having to relog after DSSing every ring so pretty much your entire time in each system is spent working around bugs for extra "fun".