Hi Sharon,

It is hard for us to say for sure. We are starting to come out of solar minimum and there have been sunspots recently, although, as you point out, there are not any on the part of the Sun facing Earth right now. The Sun is still pretty quiet.

One way to check if there will be any sunspots rotating onto the "front" of the Sun is to check the data from the STEREO spacecraft. STEREO is made up of two spacecraft, both orbiting the Sun. One of them is moving ahead of the Earth and one lagging behind. As a result, they can see more of the Sun than we can see from Earth. You can use the data to see if a sunspot is about to rotate onto the disk. The Sun takes a bit under a month to rotate.

http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

In the movie near the top of the page the part of the sun about to rotate into view is on the left side of the spinning green sun. You can still see the sunspots that were visible last week on the right side, but it looks like it will be quiet this week.

However, it is also possible for a sunspot to pop up from below the surface. We are not good at predicting that yet.

cheers,

Terry