Popular accounts of exciting discoveries often draw students to physics and astronomy, but at the introductory level it is challenging to connect with these in a meaningful way. The use of real astronomical data in the classroom can help bridge this gap and build valuable quantitative and scientific reasoning skills. This paper presents a strategy for studying Hubble's law and the accelerating expansion of the universe using actual data. Along with understanding the physical concepts, an explicit goal is to develop skills for analyzing data in terms of a model.