Proposal #562

Recently, the star LS III + 44 21 was shown to be an eclipsing binary with a previously unknown Wolf-Rayet star (Marin et al. arXiv:2408.11166). The ASAS-SN data is near the edge of saturation, so it is unclear how different the eclipse depths are. I propose to obtain multi-color photometry to cover its 4.43 d period reasonably well with ~150 points in each of the B, V, Rc, Ic filters. Through careful assessment of the light curves we can learn if the system is a regular eclipsing binary we can measure masses and radii for or if this is a member of the wind-eclipsing WR binaries where we can measure masses and a mass-loss rate for the WR star (e.g., Lamontagne et al. 1996). The differences in these light curves will be either different depths with each filter for a classical eclipsing binary or the same depth if the eclipses are caused by electron scattering in the wind.