A decade ago, two teams studying distant type Ia supernovae discovered that the
expansion of the Universe is speeding up. Since then, supernova surveys
from the ground and from space have brought major improvements
in the quality and quantity of SN Ia data, confirming the discovery of
cosmic acceleration. This talk will focus on the first cosmological results from the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey-II Supernova Survey, which operated for 9 months in
2005-7, discovering and measuring light curves and spectra for over 500 SNe Ia.
I will also discuss the observational challenges to determining supernova
distances for cosmology and how those challenges are being addressed. These results inform the
prospects for using supernovae to obtain improved cosmology measurements
from planned and proposed surveys in the future.