The MUSE-Wide Survey: Survey Description and First Data Release
  We present the MUSE-Wide survey, a blind, 3D spectroscopic survey in the
CANDELS/GOODS-S and CANDELS/COSMOS regions. Each MUSE-Wide pointing has a depth
of 1 hour and hence targets more extreme and more luminous objects over 10
times the area of the MUSE-Deep fields (Bacon et al. 2017). The legacy value of
MUSE-Wide lies in providing "spectroscopy of everything" without photometric
pre-selection. We describe the data reduction, post-processing and PSF
characterization of the first 44 CANDELS/GOODS-S MUSE-Wide pointings released
with this publication. Using a 3D matched filtering approach we detected 1,602
emission line sources, including 479 Lyman-$\alpha$ (Lya) emitting galaxies
with redshifts $2.9 \lesssim z \lesssim 6.3$. We cross-match the emission line
sources to existing photometric catalogs, finding almost complete agreement in
redshifts and stellar masses for our low redshift (z < 1.5) emitters. At high
redshift, we only find ~55% matches to photometric catalogs. We encounter a
higher outlier rate and a systematic offset of $\Delta$z$\simeq$0.2 when
comparing our MUSE redshifts with photometric redshifts. Cross-matching the
emission line sources with X-ray catalogs from the Chandra Deep Field South, we
find 127 matches, including 10 objects with no prior spectroscopic
identification. Stacking X-ray images centered on our Lya emitters yielded no
signal; the Lya population is not dominated by even low luminosity AGN. A total
of 9,205 photometrically selected objects from the CANDELS survey lie in the
MUSE-Wide footprint, which we provide optimally extracted 1D spectra of. We are
able to determine the spectroscopic redshift of 98% of 772 photometrically
selected galaxies brighter than 24th F775W magnitude. All the data in the first
data release - datacubes, catalogs, extracted spectra, maps - are available on
the website https://musewide.aip.de. [abridged]
