Question Can I get info on Scrying and its limits, please?

The three don't have lit wells yet. They play at being witches.. they aren't casting real spells outside of class where they are given the essence to power the assigned practice spells. As part of the completion of spring intro to magick, they will get to light their wells... but will then have to workon building any reasble amount of essence

As to the extent of scrying... it can be done from a number of different methods, some Psi and some Magick. What exactly you get depends on how you do it and that the spell or technique is designed to give you. For the purpose of clairvoyance, you can get anything from metaphorical visions to realistic real time high definition surveillance. none of which are legal without a warrant or consent. and most of which, even with, cannot be used in court.

The further you get from the present, the less direct your connection to the target location (or person/object/etc), the less likely you will get a clear result. Some people will still prefer to try to get 'video' streams... which would have static/lines/pixelation. Others prefer to stick to metaphor... because the visions might stay clear, just be more obscure in how they are interpreted.

Ya, not as much as you'd think. The amount of time passed since then is so long that trying to scry or use any common technique to see back that far is going to fail. Though supposedly, it is easier to scry backwards than forwards. Couple hundred years before you start hitting walls. Forwards rarely gets you beyond a generation (twenty years). WU might double or triple that effective range... but not necessarily. A lot of what makes effective scrying is about 'connection' to the original event. For example, having a blood offering from someone who was present at the original event would be a huge connection. Having one of the tools used by someone during the event would be a big connection. Such things can't really exist for future events... and are hard to keep intact and uncontaminated by other stuff for distant past events.

And yes, the references to 'what' and surveillance drones are pretty accurate. Mostly the 'framerate' on the footage is poor (you get lots of flashes of images usually... instead of one pieced together continuous stream of time).

You 'could' use scrying for something like finding your next step in a goal or to see the method used by someone else to light their Well. But you're basically using it, in reverse. You are providing the 'image' of what you would see and asking the magick to find the connection between that image and you.

The form of magick most commonly associated with finding out 'hows'? Summoning. Have something you don't know or understand? Summon someone with that knowledge to teach it to you. Of course, that was the mindset in a time when it took years to travel to an exotic local where another mage or a temple existed that was reputed to have the knowledge or tome with the information you wanted. Make dangerous and costly trips around the world instead of spending time in your lab and library? Or summon an ethereal plane entity that is known to be knowledgeable in all aspects of that type of magic/lore?