SpIES: The Spitzer IRAC Equatorial Survey
  We describe the first data release from the Spitzer-IRAC Equatorial Survey
(SpIES); a large-area survey of 115 deg^2 in the Equatorial SDSS Stripe 82
field using Spitzer during its 'warm' mission phase. SpIES was designed to
probe sufficient volume to perform measurements of quasar clustering and the
luminosity function at z > 3 to test various models for "feedback" from active
galactic nuclei (AGN). Additionally, the wide range of available
multi-wavelength, multi-epoch ancillary data enables SpIES to identify both
high-redshift (z > 5) quasars as well as obscured quasars missed by optical
surveys. SpIES achieves 5{\sigma} depths of 6.13 {\mu}Jy (21.93 AB magnitude)
and 5.75 {\mu}Jy (22.0 AB magnitude) at 3.6 and 4.5 microns, respectively -
depths significantly fainter than WISE. We show that the SpIES survey recovers
a much larger fraction of spectroscopically-confirmed quasars (98%) in Stripe
82 than are recovered by WISE (55%). This depth is especially powerful at
high-redshift (z > 3.5), where SpIES recovers 94% of confirmed quasars, whereas
WISE only recovers 25%. Here we define the SpIES survey parameters and describe
the image processing, source extraction, and catalog production methods used to
analyze the SpIES data. In addition to this survey paper, we release 234 images
created by the SpIES team and three detection catalogs: a 3.6 {\mu}m-only
detection catalog containing 6.1 million sources, a 4.5 {\mu}m-only detection
catalog containing 6.5 million sources, and a dual-band detection catalog
containing 5.4 million sources.
