Before you can harvest a moon it probably pays to find out what it produces first. This can be achieved by Moon Surveying. Moon Surveying is an activity which involves flying to a moon and launching a probe into it to find what Raw Materials it contains.
You can probe any moon in 0.4 Security space and below.
Warping to a moon which already has someones refinery residing there will likely result in a swift and pretty damn quick episode of wtfpwned if the refinery is manned.
While an industrial was once the only ship possible to scan with due to the size of scan probes, with the Cold War changes to their volume any ship can fit a sizable number. A recommended fitting includes:
A single system will have anything from 5 moons to around 90, so you will need a moon probe for each moon you want to survey.
Gaze survey probe I:
Discovery survey probe I:
Quest survey probe I:
A moon probe works similar to a scanner probe, you launch it and it returns results.
Quest Survey Probe I: Takes <font inherit/inherit;;#c0392b;;inherit>20</font> minutes to scan a moon. Discovery Survey Probe I: Takes <font inherit/inherit;;#c0392b;;inherit>5</font> minutes to scan a moon. Gaze Survey Probe I: Takes <font inherit/inherit;;#c0392b;;inherit>2.5</font> Minutes to scan a moon.
The above probes all do the same job but vary in time it takes to scan. The Probes that scan the quickest are more expensive and require more skills to use.
The stat mentioning 3 probes needed is an anomaly, and has no ingame effect at present.
Now you have your fitted ship and probes, fly to the planet of the moon you want to scan.
Do NOT warp straight to a moon
When you arrive at the planet, open your scanner and do a 360 degree scan at max km range. Sort the results and look carefully down the list. What you are looking for is a refinery. If you see one on the list then you know one of the moons has a refinery, therfore it's likely to have defences that will gank you if you warp to it.
If you don't find any refineries then you may proceed to scan. If you find a refinery you have to then isolate which moon it is at so you can avoid it.
You could do a directional scan on each moon but unless you are really good at space scanning it's probably not a good idea.
The best and fastest way to find where the refinery is as follows:
Do not warp to warp to the moon at 0km or hang around. As soon as you find which moon the refinery is at, make a note so you can avoid it.
Warp back to your safespot bookmark and jump back into your industrial.
Due to the lengthy process of moon surveying you should really try to do it when you have no one in the system. Many corporations have big interests in particular systems and moons, and will hunt you down if they find you in there trying to eat their cake.
Now that it's all clear, warp to the Moon of your choice at 15km. Try to do your surveying in chronological order, going down the list numerically.
Once you have launched the probe, open your scanner. It will show the probes countdown time until it returns results. You will also notice there is a new tab in the scanner window called 'Moon Analysis', your results flash in there once the timer hits 0.
You can move on to the next moon whilst the probe is en route to the moon, you do not have to wait until the probe hits it and you do not have to wait until a scan is finished, just keep your scanner window open and continue your surveying.
If you leave the system, change ship, or dock, your scan results will be lost. You have to stay in the system to receive the results. This is where the cloaking device on your industrial comes in handy. At the end when you are still waiting for the last few results, warp to a safe spot and cloak. By cloaking others looking for you with scan probes will not find you and you can peacefully go afk or jot down the results on paper.
Ok, so all scans are now completed and the Moon analysis tab is flashing furiously. Click it and examine what is there. If a moon does not have any materials you will recieve a pop up message after the scan telling you so.
The results are listed by planet and moon. Clicking one will expand it to show what raw materials can be harvested from that particular moon. Next to the name of the raw material you have the abundance which refers to the batch quantity that could potentially be harvested. Abundances range from 1 to 4.
It's now up to you to decide if the raw materials found at a specific moon are worth harvesting.
Remember a refinery is not a toy, they require a lot of maintenance and operation. The moon you choose has to be profitable enough to make it all worth it unless you will be covering the cost by 0.0 mining. Also, take into consideration your location, if you are in hostile space ask yourself how easy will it be to get fuel there?