The slender Coudé Tower accompanying the 2.1-meter telescope is part of a special auxiliary system
which, coupled with a separate mirror housed in a rectangular shed, enables spectroscopic work to be performed independently of the main telescope, effectively making the 2.1-meter telescope a dual observing facility. This separate system feeds light to the Coude Spectrograph, a large instrument built into the square building underneath the mirror shed. For obvious reasons, this is known as the Coude Feed telescope.

The feed has contributed to astronomical research in its application of spectroscopy of stars including spectral classification, stellar abundances, radial velocity curves of binary and variable stars, and spectrophotometric studies of variable stars.