AEGIS-X: THE CHANDRA DEEP SURVEY OF THE EXTENDED GROTH STRIP

We present the AEGIS-X survey, a series of deep Chandra ACIS-I observations of the Extended Groth Strip. The survey comprises pointings at eight separate positions, each with nominal exposure of 200 ks, covering a total area of approximately 0.67 deg(2) in a strip of length 2 degrees. We describe in detail an updated version of our data reduction and point-source-detection algorithms used to analyze these data. A total of 1325 band-merged sources have been found to a Poisson probability limit of 4 x 10(-6), with limiting fluxes of 5.3 x 10(-17) erg cm(2) s(-1) in the soft (0.5-2 keV) band and 3.8 x 10(-16) erg cm(-2) s(-1) in the hard (2-10 keV) band. We present simulations verifying the validity of our source-detection procedure and showing a very small, < 1.5%, contamination rate from spurious sources. Optical/NIR counterparts have been identified from the DEEP2, CFHTLS, and Spitzer/Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) surveys of the same region. Using a likelihood ratio method, we find optical counterparts for 76% of our sources, complete to R(AB) = 24.1, and, of the 66% of the sources that have IRAC coverage, 94% have a counterpart to a limit of 0.9 mu Jy at 3.6 mu m (m(AB) = 23.8). After accounting for (small) positional offsets in the eight Chandra fields, the astrometric accuracy of Chandra positions is found to be 0.8 rms; however, this number depends both on the off-axis angle and the number of detected counts for a given source. All data products described in this paper are made available via a public Web site.