  The angular distribution of galaxies encodes a wealth of information about
large scale structure. Ultimately, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will
record the angular positions of order 10^8 galaxies in five bands, adding
significantly to the cosmological constraints. This is the first in a series of
papers analyzing a rectangular stripe 2.5x90 degrees from early SDSS data. We
present the angular correlation function for galaxies in four separate
magnitude bins on angular scales ranging from 0.003 degrees to 15 degrees. Much
of the focus of this paper is on potential systematic effects. We show that the
final galaxy catalog -- with the mask accounting for regions of poor seeing,
reddening, bright stars, etc. -- is free from external and internal systematic
effects for galaxies brighter than r* = 22. Our estimator of the angular
correlation function includes the effects of the integral constraint and the
mask. The full covariance matrix of errors in these estimates is derived using
mock catalogs with further estimates using a number of other methods.
