Originally posted by damianc Thank you for that, it saved me the task
The upshot seems to be we have to live with it. Like I stated earlier: Rawtherapee's 'Impulse Noise reduction' does an excellent job of cleaning images up, and coupled with batch processing should make preparation for stacking straightforward. It strikes me that this may be mostly fixable in firmware given how anomolous these pixels are though.
Using Rawtherapee to look at the bayer pattern it looks like (on this image at least) that only green and red pixels are reading high
I have seen a couple of references to RawTherapee raw processing being one of the best for astro images.
I have not read anything on its ability to clean up the white dots on the K1's images though. This would be an additional approach. I currently have the C1 30 day trial, and it does an excellent job - but I like the LR processing better (color rendering) - which is probably not having enough experience with C1. I just ran across this post on the topic today...
Overall, LENR fixes the problem, but I would really would rather not double my exposure time on each frame. Taking a dark frame is an option and I'm now doing that as the last frame I take for the evening. The perfect solution is not having to deal with the problem - but at what cost in terms of in camera processing (possibly a repeat of the Sony star eater issues). I'm guessing that Pentax somewhat knew about the problem and just decided that LENR is the solution and let it slide.
I do wish that Adobe would figure out what C1 does and implement a similar approach (processing option). Having the possibly of Raw Tharapee cleaning the dots would be nice, especially since the price meets with the Chancellor of the Exchequer's approval (my wife).