What exactly are you hoping to find/learn with the first roll?

Regarding looking into time, it seems peering into the past is quite tricky using traditional divination magic. You find some spells capable of doing so, but they are very short duration (less than a minute), and can only go a short distance back in time (no more than a day or two, three at most), require you to be at the location you want to view, and can't be cast repeatedly at the same location (you generally have to wait about a day, something about 'temporal currents needing to stabilize'). In other words, you need to have the 'when' right in a single go.

The object reading spell you experience before could be closer to what you need, but as you experienced before, there are issue with processing the information. If you could either 'record' the spell's entire output so you can look through it in detail afterwards, or enhance your own processing abilities to better parse the results of the spell that could be promising though, and your research does find some avenues to do either of those. You reckon you could also try removing some of the limiters on the spell, as it is currently designed to only give you the ability for a really short moment, ad it wouldn't take much in the way of energy to keep it up longer. The book did state that the short duration was intentional to avoid overloading the one using the spell, so there could be serious risks to that though. There also remains the question of 'jumping the tracks' to the larger object, which you're not quite sure how to do given your limited knowledge on the abilities. If you could speak to someone with the actual psychic ability, they might be able to help you with that, or the Steiner papers might contain clues to this as well.

For extending the range of locate objects, you find ways to do so, but anything more than double the range gets rapidly beyond the abilities of most mages. It should be noted that the spell has a duration in the minutes, so if you could figure out a way to rapidly move the sensor there might be ways to extend the total area covered that way.