Good idea to wait for that. I tried make a small trip this week as well and I think I got around a little over 100ly away from my previous further point. It's just so boring though. Even with having other things on in the background (tv, music, etc) doesn't help. Being able to possibly land on planets and moons and potentially find interesting things there should make things more interesting.
One of my worries is going so far out that it takes equally long to get back. Also to see some of the really interesting vistas I pretty much have to keep going further out over a matter of several play sessions right? Even going as far as I did I didn't see anything strangely different then before but then again I wasn't dropping into range of every planet and astroid belt after scanning them. I was focused mainly on getting exploration money.
I really should just pick a point, write it down for the next session, and keep going no matter what and then see where I am within a few weeks once the expansion drops. Until then I think I'm going to focus just trying to get enough money to outfit my ship for the trip.
Keeping a log of destinations or better, just using the grid coordinates is super useful. It is pretty damn boring with exploration's current implementation and IMO the things you'll see are not really worth the tedium. Will be better once Horizons drops but I expect those airless surfaces to be just as boring after seeing a few different types. Exploration needs some major love.
I don't know if it'll feel like it should until you can EVA. Imagine being in a newly designed ship that deploys a boom like the space shuttle that you can EVA out to and set your scanning equipment for the system you're in, maybe different equipment for scan types etc. Just needs something more active that feels like you're actually doing something. Or a console on the ship with dedicated scanning equipment you have to cycle etc. Honking a horn and pointing your ship at an object is just so uninspired.
It's a grind, like most other ways to make money in the game, and definitely isn't for everyone. 99.9% of the time, you'll get a system not much unlike the rest of the ones you've seen. What I'm interested in are the subtle variances of the procedural content as well as the extremes it produces--the record breakers. Beyond that, developing a sense of pattern recognition in the content generation is fun in its own right for the science-minded folks, and helps make your expeditions much more efficient and profitable--you'll start getting far more habitable worlds in far less time when you know where to look.
One other thing that has added immensely to my enjoyment of exploration trips is the ability to effortlessly log the journey with
EDDiscovery, which reads your game logs and builds a searchable/sortable database of all your visited systems. It's awesome, and has fully replaced my pen and paper. For example, just typing "water" instantly lists all my noted water world systems (I use a "!" anywhere in the notes to indicate first discoveries to make those searchable as well):
For anyone wishing they had a way to go back and look at all the systems they've visited, that app is the best answer until (if ever) Frontier implements some sort of Universal Cartographics Console within the game itself. It also has the means to export distance data to
EDSM, trilaterate systems to find their exact coordinates, and build a zoomable 3D map of all the known systems. There's even a built-in screenshot converter which can automatically name your shots by the system you're in, so you'll never be left wondering where that awesome view was located. Helping to map the galaxy via EDSM just adds another layer of purpose to your journeys, and they've also got a leaderboard of the top 100 distance contributors, adding a bit of competition to it all.
Also, all the new exploration stats in the right UI panel are excellent. They also fixed the system searching problems on the galaxy map! What an update.