Reexamination of the Radial Abundance Gradient Break in NGC 3359
  In this contribution, we reexamine the radial oxygen abundance gradient in
the strongly barred spiral galaxy NGC 3359, for which, using an imaging
spectrophotometric technique, Martin & Roy detected a break near the effective
radius of the galaxy. We have new emission line flux measurements of HII
regions in NGC 3359 from spectra obtained with the Subaru telescope to further
investigate this claim. We find that there are small systematic variations in
the line ratios determined from narrow-band imaging as compared to our
spectroscopic measurements. We derive and apply a correction to the line ratios
found by Martin & Roy and statistically examine the validity of the gradient
break proposed for NGC 3359 using recently developed metallicity diagnostics.
We find that, with a high degree of confidence, a model with a break fits the
data significantly better than one without it. This suggests that the presence
of a strong bar in spiral galaxies can generate measurable changes in the
radial distribution of metals.
