As my final piece will focus on the planets of the solar system orbiting the Sun, I wanted to attempt an animation of one planet orbiting the sun to see if it would be a viable animation.
I started by creating two spheres, one the Sun and the other Earth. I then added an emission shader to the sun sphere and added a noise texture, connecting it to the shader with a colour ramp. This allowed me to add sunspots to the shader to make it look more realistic.
An image showing the applied texture to the sun asset. 
An image showing the nodes used to create the emissive texture for the sun asset.
I then added a shader to the Earth sphere, again adding a noise texture then connecting it with a colour ramp. I made the primary colours blue and green, the added a small amount of orange in the middle for some sand on the edges of the islands. The shader is an exact representation of Earth but it does all is needed currently.
An image showing the nodes used to create the texture for the Earth asset.
After finalising the shaders, I added a sun light and pointed it towards the Earth object. I then parented it to the Earth sphere so that it would follow it as it orbits the Sun sphere. I then added an empty object and parented the Earth object to it. This causes the Earth sphere to rotate around the sun when I keyframe the rotation of the empty object.
An image showing the parenting of the Earth asset to the empty asset.
Finally, I keyframed the Z rotation of the empty so that the Earth sphere orbits around the Sun sphere. I then keyframed the Z rotation of the Earth sphere so that it would spin as it orbits the Sun sphere. Lastly, I keyframed the rotation of the noise texture on the Sun sphere shader so that the sun spots would move.
An image showing the timeline with the keyframes of the empty.
An image showing the keyframed values of the Earth asset. 
An image showing the keyframed value of the Empty. 
An image showing the keyframed value of the Sun texture within the node editor.
Once completed, I rendered the animation.