Tiruvannamalai: While the Barani Deepam will be lit inside the Arunachaleswarar temple at 4 am, the Maha Deepam will be lit atop the hill at 6 pm. The Maha Deepam, which will mark the conclusion of the annual 10-day festival of the temple, once lit can be seen up to a distance of 10 km. On Thursday, a team of 10 temple staff and devotees, placed the cauldron inside a harness of casuarina poles which was then carried to the hilltop. The team started its uphill trek, after the completion of poojas for the cauldron inside the temple. The temple workers along with the cauldron, carried 3.5 tonnes of ghee, 1000 metres of gada cloth for the wick and camphor. The refurbished cauldron, which had a circumference of four feet, was two-feet and six-inches at the bottom and painted in saffron. Once the cauldron made of copper reached the hill, it was placed on a giant boulder. For the next 10 days, the cauldron will be held in the present position, with stay wires attached to the nearby rocks. A wick was then cut and placed inside to light up the cauldron. Following this, ghee was used as the flammable oil to light the wick. Since, the ghee-immersed wick takes longer time to burn, huge blocks of camphor was also placed to facilitate quick lighting of the Deepam. At an auspicious time on Friday, a flaming torch will be used to light the camphor which when afire can be seen from miles around. Once the cauldron was lit, workers would use huge ladles to pour ghee into the cauldron. For the next 10 days, Deepam will be lit at 6 pm will be doused at 6 am the next morning and again relit the same evening. 1,600 tickets sold via online in just 1 hourThough there were initial glitches, the response to the online sale of tickets for Barani and Maha Deepam on evoked an overwhelming response. In just one hour, 1600 tickets were sold through the system on Thursday. Officials opted for the online sale of tickets to regulate the rush of devotees inside the Arunachaleswarar temple. The temple earlier announced that 500 tickets priced at Rs 500 each would be sold for the Barani deepam and 1000 tickets priced at Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 for the Maha deepam would be available. When the website opened for the sale of the tickets, the server slowed down. Because of this, the devotees who were supposed to receiving their OTP within a few minutes of logging on, got it only after 50 minutes. When asked about this, officials said that the sudden spurt in demand was not anticipated, hence the system got jammed and the server slowed down.