How to avoid losing a drone

I received my brand new Mini 3 Pro a few days ago and I was working on my second video about

it regarding footage quality which I will publish in a few days

I was trying the low light capabilities. I had noticed before that in low light this model is very dark, so I was trying different

settings as I thought there might be something wrong. I have only one battery at the moment as the fly more combo is not available yet where

I live. The battery was charging but I wanted to catch the last bit of twilight before full night

so I decided to fire the drone up even though the battery was just above half level

I had previously done some night footage in manual mode and the results were very disappointing

so this time I wanted to try the auto mode to see if some magic would happen

But as you can see the footage is still extremely dark even though it was not yet full night

But this is a matter for my next video about footage quality

As you can see from the screen recording I took off with about 15 minutes of flying time

which is a bit too tight. Since I knew that I had reduced battery life I took off and immediately started flying

towards the target for my first clip, instead of waiting for the satellite to lock, which

likely generally happens in a very short time through the mini tree

Therefore the home point was updated a bit further away from my location and this does

not help when trying to land the aircraft in very dark conditions, as the best way to

retrieve a drone for landing is to have an accurate home point and check the distance

of the drone relative to it in the lower left part of the screen

After three very quick clips I started bringing the birds back towards the nest

I noticed that Mount Etna right at that moment was putting up a show and I was very tempted

to shoot some very spectacular footage, but I decided to behave and bring the drone back

as I was running a bit short of battery. But I still had 6 minutes left and I was not too far away

With any other drone I have no issue locating my position at this time at night, but with

the mini tree everything was extremely dark and I could not even recognize my house

According to the distance the drone was supposed to be very close, but I could not see the

flashing LEDs. As I said my home point was not updated in the correct location

Time was really running short now and I started to panic a bit

I decided to hit the return to home button to have quickly the drone as close as possible

But I had not yet checked the return to home altitude, which was set by default to a whopping

100 meters. Therefore it took a lot of time to ascend and then to bring him back down, further draining

the batteries. At this point I did a last desperate bid to try and bring it back, but the battery was gone