1. "is that on the part of the ball you cant see?"
Yes, the opposite side of the contact point relative to CB center, so imagine like where the actual contact point is relative to CB center, then mirror that to the other side, that's the point I start at.
2. "last your X's are on a diagonal, shouldnt they be horizontal on the equator?"
Basically I am visualizing the following (points in 3D space) in this order: Opposite of contact point, OB center, contact point, GB center. All of those 4 points fall along the same line, which is (from the POV of the shot line for a non-straight shot) diagonal and not horizontal on the equator because I am not flattening them out, but rather considering where they are in the 3D space.
View attachment 874372
Here is a top-down view:
1: Opposite of contact point
2: OB center
3: Contact point
4: GB center
The key idea is that no matter what perspective you are looking at, the distance between consequtive points is always equal, so diff between 1<->2 is same as 2<->3 and 3<->4. I visualize where point 1 is, then work backwards from there by jumping my gaze to 2, 3 and then finally 4. The reason I start at 1 instead of just 2 which is the more common approach, is that this one extra step gives me a better feel for the distance, which is helpful because as the distance stays the same between jumps, getting more repetitions of this jump makes it easier to judge the final jump from 3 to 4, which is the hardest to judge, compared to e.g. judging OB center or the contact point.
Once I have my gaze on point 4, I will align myself to shoot towards that point (doing necessary adjustments for side etc. if needed), then go down on the shot.
This method obviously requires good visualization of the contact points, and it is effectively just a longer method of arriving at ghost ball, which if you can visualize well, makes it easier to just skip all of these steps and go straight to aiming at the GB center. But if you don't visualize the GB well (which is the case for me), this method can be a good setup for finding GB center reliably. The whole thing typically takes like 3-4 seconds, and it gets faster the more you do it.
Another way of explaining why using point 1 at the start instead of just doing 2->3->4 helps is that you are doing two jumps, 1->2 and 2->3 before needing to jump to the GB location. Let's say it's a tough shot and you misjudge the jumps slightly, with jump 1->2 being slightly longer than 2->3. This signals you that you did something wrong, and then you can either re-attempt from the beginning or just take the average of those two jumps to minimize the error for the final jumps distance. This will produce better results than just starting from 2->3 and trusting that the distance was correct for 3->4.
Hope I explained it more clearly.
