animate a movie clip symbol

Hi.

Alternatively you can create this kind of animation using the rotate property of a tween combined with the Transformation Point (the white dot) placed at the center of the rotation. This technique can be used to rotate the planets around the Sun.

For the rotation of the planets themselves, you can pan a map masked by a circle like @judyb5270468 suggested.

Here is an example:

adobe/animate cc/animation/planets_orbiting at master · joao-cesar/adobe (github.com)

Please ignore the poor quality of my animation. The idea here is provide a simple structure to help you get started.

Regards,

JC

Another option would be to have an image of the planets surface animated to pass across the front of the planet shape from one side to the other. Then to create a mask so that it clips the edges of the image to look rounded to match the shape of the planet. It will look like it's rotating even though it's just the surface image passing from one side to the other. 

As Kglad mentioned, for a planet orbiting another object, this can be done by creating a motion path and attaching your planet to move along this path with keyframes. I hope that made sense.

for a rotating object like earth you would need to import a sequence of images that when displayed (sequentially) make it appear the object is rotating.

moving the rotating object around another object (like the earth orbiting the sun) can all be done in animate using a tween path.