We present the first results of a wide area X-ray survey within the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Stripe 82, a 300 deg2 region of the sky with a
substantial investment in multi-wavelength coverage. We analyzed archival {\it
Chandra} observations that cover 7.5 deg2 within Stripe 82 ("Stripe 82
ACX"), reaching 4.5σ flux limits of 7.9×10−16,
3.4×10−15 and 1.8×10−15 erg s−1 cm−2 in the soft
(0.5-2 keV), hard (2-7 keV) and full (0.5-7 keV) bands, to find 774, 239 and
1118 X-ray sources, respectively. Three hundred twenty-one sources are detected
only in the full band and 9 sources are detected solely in the soft band.
Utilizing data products from the {\it Chandra} Source Catalog, we construct
independent LogN-LogS relationships, detailing the number density of X-ray
sources as a function of flux, which show general agreement with previous {\it
Chandra} surveys. We compare the luminosity distribution of Stripe 82 ACX with
the smaller, deeper CDF-S + E-CDFS surveys and with {\it Chandra}-COSMOS,
illustrating the benefit of wide-area surveys in locating high luminosity AGN.
We also investigate the differences and similarities of X-ray and optical
selection to uncover obscured AGN in the local Universe. Finally, we estimate
the population of AGN we expect to find with increased coverage of 100 deg2
or 300 deg2, which will provide unprecedented insight into the high
redshift, high luminosity regime of black hole growth currently
under-represented in X-ray surveys.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 15 pages, 6 Figures, 2 Table