  Mazeh, Holczer, and Shporer (2015) have presented an approach that can, in
principle, use the derived transit timing variation (TTV) of some transiting
planets observed by the $Kepler$ mission to distinguish between prograde and
retrograde motion of their orbits with respect to their parent stars' rotation.
The approach utilizes TTVs induced by spot-crossing events that occur when the
planet moves across a spot on the stellar surface, looking for a correlation
between the derived TTVs and the stellar brightness derivatives at the
corresponding transits. This can work even in data that cannot temporally
resolve the spot-crossing events themselves. Here we apply this approach to the
$Kepler$ KOIs, identifying nine systems where the photometric spot modulation
is large enough and the transit timing accurate enough to allow detection of a
TTV-brightness-derivatives correlation. Of those systems five show highly
significant prograde motion (Kepler-17b, Kepler-71b, KOI-883.01, KOI-895.01,
and KOI-1074.01), while no system displays retrograde motion, consistent with
the suggestion that planets orbiting cool stars have prograde motion. All five
systems have impact parameter $0.2\lesssim b\lesssim0.5$, and all systems
within that impact parameter range show significant correlation, except
HAT-P-11b where the lack of a correlation follows its large stellar obliquity.
Our search suffers from an observational bias against detection of high impact
parameter cases, and the detected sample is extremely small. Nevertheless, our
findings may suggest that stellar spots, or at least the larger ones, tend to
be located at a low stellar latitude, but not along the stellar equator,
similar to the Sun.
