When a sufficiently large image with raw noise is given to Statistics to find its mode of its pixel distribution, it fails (returning a NaN). This bug can be reproduced with this command (running it multiple times will use a different random number generator; and therefore a different noised value for every pixel):

astarithmetic 2048 4096 2 makenew 10 mknoise-sigma --output=noise-large.fits

aststatistics noise-large.fits --mode

With Gnuastro 0.16.143-1427d (see [1] below), I tried the command above many times, and in all cases, the output of Statistics was NaN!

However, when I made a smaller noised image with the commands below, it worked perfectly:

astarithmetic 1000 2000 2 makenew 10 mknoise-sigma --output=noise-small.fits

aststatistics noise-small.fits --mode

Again, repeating this multiple times will mostly work: I did get a NaN for this size when the random number generator was 'ranlxs1', with a seed of  '1645053800' or '1644372467'. But generally it worked (for example with seeds of '1644613667', '1645245226' or '1644502467'). For how to set seeds, see the Generating random numbers section of the book.

We need to see what is happening with the mode-finding algorithm that it can't find the mode in these ideal cases (where the mode is approximately in the center, but with many points)!

[1] While writing this report, I found and fixed bug #62008, so please reproduce this bug with a more recent version of Gnuastro.