Amateur Photometric Distance Measurements for Type Ia Supernovae

I began thinking about what I wanted to research in the spring of 2025. I eventually landed on my first solid idea. I thought that with my computerized telescope, I could take spectra of protostars inside star forming regions/nebulae. This turned out to be quite difficult. It was expensive and not feasible. Over the summer, I began to image galaxies and nebulae on clear nights. One night in late June, I imaged the galaxy NGC 7331, a local galaxy that isn’t unlike the Milky Way. It was a nice image, though nothing I was proud of. But, on July 14th, a supernova was discovered in that galaxy which gave me the INCREDIBLY rare opportunity to capture my own image before and after the supernova. So on July 25th, I briefly imaged the galaxy again. August 2nd is when I took the first solid, photometrically analyzable image. By then, I realized that using the knowledge about cosmology that I have from years prior, my project could be about photometry and supernovae. After thinking about it a little more, doing some research, and taking a few more images throughout August and September, I landed on my topic: can amateurs perform accurate differential photometry on supernovae to determine the distances to their host galaxies?