create equally spaced circles around a sphere object

Question

I'm attempting to create a similar graph as this:

Is there a specific way in illustrator to equally space the circles around a center circle?

What I've done is created the center circle, then a larger circle that overlaps it (with opacity 50% or so), then lined the outer circles around the edge of the large circle. The issue is they aren't equally spaced apart, maybe another hour of playing with it they will be, but is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

First, create 2 circles. The 2 circles don't have to be center aligned as shown in my screen shot above.

While having the smaller circle selected, hit the Rotate tool. (R for shortcut). Now, hold on Option/Alt key, and click on the center of the bigger circle. This tells the anchor point the small circle should be rotating from. After you click on the center you will get the popup for the angle input. For the angle, you should input a number that's divisible by 360. For my example I used 30, so you get 12 smaller circles.

Turn on preview, and hit Copy.

Now hit CMD+D, or Control+D to redo the last step. Keep on doing this until you get all the circles.