Bar plot with polar axis

Question

I want to make my plot similar to this-

Currently, what I am able to get is this:

I am not able to do the following things:

1. Get the time labels inside the inner circle
2. Get the ticks inside the circle. This question - How to create minor ticks for polar plot matplotlib, had an idea which I tried but it was messing up with other parts of the plot.
3. Time labels only work properly when the step size is 3. For other steps, it does not align with the bars.

Below is the reproducible code to produce the plot

arr = np.random.randint(0, 24, size = 50000)
df = pd.DataFrame({"COL": arr}).COL.value_counts().sort_index()

N = 24
bottom = 1000
theta, width = np.linspace(0.0, 2 * np.pi, N, endpoint=False, retstep=True)

plt.figure(figsize = (10, 6))
ax = plt.subplot(111, polar=True)

bars = ax.bar(
    theta, df,
    width=width-0.03,
    bottom=bottom,
    color="#f39c12", edgecolor="black"
)
bars = ax.bar(
    theta, [3000]*24,
    width=width-0.03,
    bottom=bottom,
    color="#f39c12", alpha=0.2
)

ax.set_theta_zero_location("N")
ax.set_theta_direction(-1)
ax.grid(False)
ax.spines['polar'].set_visible(False)
ax.set_rticks([])

ticks = [f"{i}:00" for i in range(0, 24, 3)]
ax.set_xticklabels(ticks)

_ = ax

Answer 1

I just drew two lines and a circle to make the "clock icon"

## Draw a "clock" icon inside of the graph
##lines for hands of a clock
x1, y1 = [0, 90], [0, 0.5*bottom]
x2, y2 = [0,0], [0, 0.5*bottom]
plt.plot(x1, y1, x2, y2, linewidth=2.5, solid_capstyle='round', color='#0066ff', alpha=1)

##circle for clockface
circle = pl.Circle((0, 0), 0.65*bottom, transform=ax.transData._b, linewidth=3, fill=False, color="#0066ff", alpha=1)
ax.add_artist(circle)

did you ever figure out how to write the numbers inside of the clock?