Ok, here's the thing about exploration and scanning just now. it's either bugged or the devs have set it up in a particular way for testing purposes.

Firstly, the detailed surface scanner is only available for the Sidewinder for some reason. There are various version of the default Discovery scanner available, though. the basic one which all ships have is capable of picking up stellar objects up to 500 LS away. Some much larger objects might be picked up further out, though. The upgrades to the basic scanner pick things up further out.

Secondly, I don't know whether it's bugged or not, but doing a proper scan with the basic Discovery scanner seems to give detailed information on A: what sort of planet or start class it is (rocky, ice etc) and B: Atmospheric infor (including whether there is any microbeal life). This seems too much for the basic model. I really don't know whether it's supposed to be like this.

Thirdly, and this is important if you want to make proper money from exploring: at the moment, if you want to make big bucks, then simply jump into a system and fly around until you have plenty of objects logged as unknown. Do NOT lock up one of those objects and do a proper scan. it seems to overwrite the previous data and you will get less money when you sell it to Universal Cartographic.

Yep, this is probably bugged at the moment but the fact remains if you do the most basic, basic scans of a system and go and sell the data somewhere you will make far more than doing the proper scans of each planet, star and moon. For example, I jumped into a system and logged three stars as 'Unknown' and went off and sold that info at the next system for 6000cr. I then did a full scan of the next system I was in and received less than 1000cr for perperly scanning each individual body. There were about 16 in total. Most I made in total was about 18000cr for a medium sized binary star system. I simply logged all the unknowns I could find and jumped away to sell the info.